NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

A STUDY 



BY 

WILLIAM MACKINTIRE SALTER ^ 

Author of First Steps in Philosophy and 
Anarchy or Government? An Inquiry in Fundamental Politics 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1917 



^ 



>\ 






Copyright, 1917, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY S 



THE OUINN 4 BOOEN CO. PRE8S 

HANWAV, N. i. 

1338 . 

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TO 

flD. (5, S* 

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IN LONELY WAYS AND STUDIES 



OCT 2 1917 



PREFACE 

Criticism of Nietzsche is rife, understanding rare; this book 
is a contribution to the understanding of him. At the same 
time I have tried not merely to restate his thoughts, but to 
re-think them, using more or less my own language. To enable 
those interested to judge of the correctness of the interpreta- 
tion, the original passages are referred to almost constantly. 
I limit myself to his fundamental points of view — noting only 
in passing or not at all his thoughts on education, his later 
views of art and music, his conception of woman, his inter- 
pretation of Christianity and attitude to religion. 

If I differ from some who have written in English upon 
him, it is partly in a sense of the difficulty and delicacy of the 
undertaking. Few appear to have thought it worth while to 
study Nietzsche — the treatment he commonly receives is (to 
use an expressive German word, for which I know no good 
short equivalent) "plump." If I should be myself found — 
by those who know — to have simplified him at times too much 
and not done justice to all his nuances, I should not protest 
and only hope that some day some one will do better. 

The book was in substance written before the present Euro- 
pean War, and without a thought of such a monstrous 
possibility. It has become the fashion to connect Nietzsche 
closely with it. One American professor has even called 
it — the German side of it — " Nietzsche in Action" and an 
early book by a group of Oxford scholars, Why We Are at 
War, was advertised under the heading ' ' The Euro-Nietzschean 
(or Anglo-Nietzschean) War." But as matter of fact, the war 
would probably have arisen about as it did and been conducted 
about as it has been, had he never existed; and so far as I 
can find him touching it in any special way, it is as a diagnosti- 
cian of the general conditions which appear to have given 
birth to it — i.e., what he calls " Europe's system of small states 
and small politics" (in contrast to a united Europe and a 



vi PREFACE 

great politics, on which he set his heart), ''this nevrose na- 
tionale with which Europe is sick/' "this sickness and un- 
reason which is the strongest force against culture that exists, 
nationalism," for perpetuating which he holds Germans 
largely [perhaps too much] responsible, and "which with the 
founding of the German Empire passed into a critical state" 
(Ecce Homo, XII, x, §2-, Twilight of the Idols, ix, §39). 
These last words may perhaps be said to suggest some such 
catastrophe as has now taken place, and I know of no other 
passage that foreshadows it more particularly. I have dealt with 
the subject in a special article elsewhere ("Nietzsche and the 
War," International Journal of Ethics, April, 1917). That our 
own country has now been drawn — forced — into the maelstrom 
does not alter its essential character. 

As to the final disposition of Nietzsche, I offer no counsels 
now, and really, as intimated, counsels — criticism, such as it 
is — abound. Even one's newspaper will usually put him in his 
place! Or, if one wishes a book, Mr. Paul Elmer More's Nietz- 
sche, "compact as David's pebble," will serve, the Harvard 
Graduates' Magazine tells us, "to slay the Nietzschean giant," 
and if we desire heavier blows, — I will not say they are more 
skilful — we may take up Dr. Paul Carus's Nietzsche and Other 
Exponents of Individualism. What, however, does not seem to 
abound is knowledge of the object slain, or to be slain, i.e., some 
elementary and measurably clear idea of who, or rather what, 
Nietzsche was, particularly in his underlying points of view. 
And even the present fresh attempt in this direction — for others 
have preceded me, notably Dr. Dolson, Mr. Ludovici, Miss Ham- 
blen, Dr. Chatterton-Hill, Dr. A. Wolf, author of the best extant 
monograph on Nietzsche, and Professor H. L. Stewart, whose 
eye, however, is rather too much on present controversial issues 
for scientific purposes — would be a work of supererogation, had 
Nietzsche ever given us an epitome of his thinking himself, or 
were Professor Raoul Richter's masterly Friedrich Nietzsche, 
sein Leoen und sein Werk translated into English, or were 
Professor Henri Lichtenberger's admirable La Philosophic de 
Nietzsche, which has been translated, a little more extended 
and thoroughgoing — at least, my book could then only beg 
consideration from Americans as a piece of "home industry." 



PREFACE vii 

As for criticism — unquestionably the thing of final moment in 
relation to every thinker — if I can only help to make it in this 
case a little more intelligent in the future, I shall for the present 
be satisfied. 

I owe thanks to Mr. Thomas Common of Corstorphine, Scot- 
land — perhaps the first English-speaking Nietzsche scholar of 
our day, ''first" in both senses of the word — for help in locating 
passages from the Works, which I omitted to note the source 
of in first coming upon them and could not afterward find, 
or which I came upon in other writers on Nietzsche. 
Unfortunately a few remain unlocated — also some from the 
Briefe. Acknowledgments are due to the editors of The 
Hibbert Journal, The International Journal of Ethics, The 
Journal of Philosophy, and Mind for permission to use ma- 
terial which originally appeared as articles in those periodicals. 

Though gratefully recognizing the enterprise of Dr. Oscar 
Levy in making possible an English translation of the greater 
part of Nietzsche's Werke, I have used the original German 
editions, making my own translations or versions — save of 
poetical passages, where I have been glad to follow, with his 
permission, Mr. Common. I cite, however, as far as possible, 
by paragraph or section, the same in the Werke (both octavo 
and pocket editions) and the English, French, and other trans- 
lations; the posthumous material, except Will to Power and 
Ecce Homo, I am obliged to cite by volume and page of the 
German octavo edition (vols. IX-XIV inclusive — the second 
eds. of IX to XII), where alone it appears in full. I have also 
drawn on Nietzsche's Briefe (6 vols.). The recently published 
Philologica (3 vols.), principally records of his University 
teaching, I have practically left unutilized. The numerals (1, 
2, 3, etc.) in the text refer to the bottom of the page, the 
letters (a, b, c, etc.) to notes at the end of the book. <( Werke 
means the octavo edition, unless otherwise stated. 

W. M. S. 

Silver Lake, New Hampshire, 
June, 1917. 



j j 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTORY 

CHAPTER PAGE 

. I Nietzsche's Relation to His Time; His Life and Per- 
sonal Tbaits 1 

II Some Characteristics of His Thinking . . . . 10 

III His " Megalomania," Periods, Constant Points of View, 

Spiritual Ancestry 21 

FIRST PERIOD 

IV General View of the World; the Function of Art . 34 
V Ultimate Analysis of the World 45 

VI Ethical Views 58 

VII Social and Political Ideas 72 

VIII Relations with Wagner 78 

SECOND PERIOD 

IX General Marks of the Second Period 92 

X General Outlook, and Ultimate View of the World . 101 

XI Attitude to Morals 115 

.. XII Social and Political Views and Forecasts . . .129 



THIRD PERIOD 

XIII General Character of the Period, and View of the World 148 

XIV The Idea of Eternal Recurrence 163 

XV Ultimate Reality as Will to Power 182 

XVI Criticism of Morality. Introductory 202 

XVII Criticism of Morality ( Cont. ) . The Social Function and 

Meaning of Morality 210 

XVIII Criticism of Morality (Cont.). Have Evil and Cruelty 

No Place in the World? 226 

XIX Criticism of Morality (Cont.). Varying Types of 

Morality 246 

XX Criticism of Morality (Cont.). Responsibility, Rights 

and Duties, Justice 261 

XXI Criticism of Morality ( Cont. ) . Bad Conscience, a Moral 

Order, Ought, Equality 274 

ix 



x CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XXII Cbiticism of Morality ( Cont. ) . The " Altruistic " Senti- 
ments .... 293 

XXIII Criticism of Morality {Concluded). Truth as an 

Obligation. Net Results of the Criticism . . . 314 

XXIV Moral Construction. The Moral Aim Proposed by 

Nietzsche . 332 

XXV Moral Construction (Cont.). The Moral Aim and Will 

to Power 354 

XXVI Moral Construction {Cont.). "Persons," or Great 

Men . . . 380 

XXVII Moral Construction (Concluded). The Superman . . 398 

XXVIII Social Criticism. Analysis of Modern Social Tendencies 417 

XXIX Social Construction. The Ideal Organization of Society 425 
XXX Social Construction (Concluded). Political Views and 

Anticipations 455 

Epilogue - . . 474 

Notes 475 

Index 527 



INTRODUCTORY 

CHAPTER I 

NIETZSCHE'S RELATION TO HIS TIME; HIS LIFE AND 
PERSONAL TRAITS 



Once when about to give a "Nietzsche" course before a uni- 
versity audience, those in charge suggested to me — a novice 
in such situations — that I should begin by considering some 
of the notable aspects or tendencies of our present civilization 
which Nietzsche expresses, so as to give a raison d'etre for the 
course. It seemed to be taken for granted that he reflected 
the age and was chiefly important as illustration — perhaps as 
warning. I confess that I was somewhat embarrassed. For 
what had struck me as I had been reading him was that he 
went more or less counter to most of the distinctive tend- 
encies of our time. My personal experience had been of shock 
after shock. Long before, and when he was little more than 
a name to me, I had spoken of the idea of getting "beyond 
good and evil" as naturally landing one in a madhouse; and 
when I first read him and ventured to lecture on him before 
an Ethical Society (1907), I could only consider him as an 
enemy who stood "strikingly and brilliantly for what we do 
not believe." 

As afterward I came to know him more thoroughly, I was 
less willing to pass sweeping judgment upon him, and yet the 
impression only deepened that here was a force antagonistic to 
the dominant forces about us. At many points he seemed more 
mediaeval than modern. He failed to share the early nineteenth 
century enthusiasm for liberty, and he opposed the later social- 
istic tendency. He regretted the intensification of the nation- 
alist spirit which set in among the various European countries 



2 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

after the defeat of Napoleon, deeming it reactionary — his ideas 
were super-national, European. He found retrogression in Ger- 
many, and belabored the Empire and the new DeutscJitJium. 
He shared, indeed, the modern scientific spirit, but he could not 
long content himself with a purely scientific philosophy and de- 
plored the lapse of German philosophy into " criticism' ' and 
scientific specialism. Of Darwinism I might say that he ac- 
cepted it and did not accept it, whether as natural history or 
as morals, regarding the struggle for existence, unhindered by 
ideal considerations, as favoring, through overemphasis of the 
social virtues, the survival of the weak rather than the strong. 
In the religious field, the tendency today is, amid uncertainties 
about Christian dogma, to emphasize Christian morality — 
Nietzsche questioned Christian morality itself. In business 
relations the time is marked by commercialism and a certain 
ruthless egoism (on all sides), but Nietzsche, though with an 
occasional qualification, had something of the feeling of an 
old-time aristocrat for the commercial spirit; he lamented the 
effect of our "American gold-hunger" upon Europe; he thought 
that one trouble with Germany was that there were too many 
traders there, paying producers the lowest and charging con- 
sumers the highest price ; he wished a political order that would 
control egoisms, whether high or low. War, at least till the 
present monstrous one, has not characterized our age more than 
others, but there have been wars enough — and Nietzsche found 
most of them ignoble : trade, combined with narrow nationalistic 
aims, inspires them — the peoples having become like traders 
who lie in wait to take advantage of one another ; 1 the present 
war he would probably have found not unlike the rest. All 
this, though he held that the warlike instinct, in some form or 
other, belonged essentially to human nature as to all advancing 
life, and that in all probability war in the literal sense would 
have worthy occasion in the future. 

The fact is that Nietzsche was a markedly individual 
thinker and lived to an extraordinary extent from within. 
While it would be venturesome to say that there is anything 
new in him and a subtle chemistry might perhaps trace every 
thought or impulse of his to some external source, the sources 
1 Thus spake Zarathustra, III, xii, § 21. 



RELATION TO HIS TIME 3 

lay to a relatively slight extent in his immediate environment.* 
Unquestionably he was influenced by Schopenhauer and by 
Wagner; but it was not long before he was critical toward 
them both. Late in life he remarked that to be a philosopher 
one must be capable of great admirations, but must also have 
a force of opposition — and he thought that he had stood the 
tests, as he had allowed himself to be alienated from his prin- 
cipal concern, neither by the great political movement of Ger- 
many, nor by the artistic movement of Wagner, nor by the 
philosophy of Schopenhauer, though his experiences had been 
hard and at times he was ill. 2b In another retrospection he 
says that while like Wagner he was a child of his time, hence 
a decadent, he had known how to defend himself against the 
fatality. 3 So slight did he feel his contact with the time to be, 
so imperceptible was his influence, so profound his isolation, 
particularly in his later years, that he spoke of himself as an 
"accident" among Germans, and said with a touch of humor, 
"My time is not yet, some are posthumously born." 4 I cannot 
make out that his influence is appreciable now — at least in 
English-speaking countries ; even in Germany, where for a time 
he had a certain vogue, his counsels and ideas have been far 
more disregarded than followed — and though in the present 
war some university-bred soldiers may be inspired by his praise 
of the warrior-spirit and the manly virtues, men from Oxford 
might be similarly inspired, if they but knew him. d He has 
indeed, given a phrase and perhaps an idea or two to Mr 
Bernard Shaw, a few scattering scholars have got track of him ' 
(I know of but two or three in America), the great newspaper 
and magazine-writing and reading world has picked up a few 
of his phrases, which it does not understand, like ' ' superman, ' 
"blond beast," "will to power," "beyond good and evil,' 
" transvaluation of values" — but influence is another matter 
He has changed nothing, whether in thought or public policy 
has neither lifted men up nor lowered them, though mistaken 
images of him may have had occasionally the latter effect, the 
truth being simply that he is out of most men's ken. 

a Letters here and elsewhere refer to notes to be found at end of book. 

2 Werke, XIV, 347-8, § 202. 

8 Preface to " The Case of Wagner." 

4 "Nietzsche contra Wagner," § 7, Ecce Homo, III, § 1. 



4 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

But because a man, however much talked about, has had 
slight real influence, having gone mostly counter to the currents 
of his time, it does not follow that he is not important, even 
vastly so, and that the future will not take large account of 
him. I do not wish to prophesy, but I have a suspicion that 
sometime — perhaps at no very distant date — writers on serious 
themes will be more or less classified according as they know 
him or not ; that we shall be speaking of a pre-Nietzschean and 
a post-Nietzschean period in philosophical, and particularly in 
ethical and social, analysis and speculation — and that those who 
have not made their reckoning with him will be as hopelessly 
out of date as those who have failed similarly with Kant. Al- 
ready I am conscious for my own part of a certain antiquated 
air in much of our contemporary discussion — it is unaware of 
the new and deep problems which Nietzsche raises; and the 
references made to him (for almost every writer seems to feel 
that he must refer to him) only show how superficial the 
acquaintance with him ordinarily is. Far am I from asserting 
that we shall follow him ; I simply mean that we shall know him, 
ponder over him, perchance grapple with him — and whether he 
masters us or we him, the strength of the struggle and the 
illumination born of it will become part of our better intel- 
lectual selves. 

n 

Although this book is no biography of Nietzsche (save in the 
spiritual sense), it may be well at the outset to state the main 
facts of his life, and also to mention some of the striking points 
in his personal character. 

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, 
in Rocken, a small Prussian village, where his father was a 
Protestant pastor. His mother was a pastor's daughter — and 
back of his father on both sides there was a current of theological 
blood. From his fourteenth to his twentieth year he was at 
Schulpforta, one of the strictest and best of German preparatory 
schools. At twenty he went to the University at Bonn, matricu- 
lating as a student of theology and philosophy. A year later 
he followed his " great" teacher, Ritschl, to Leipzig, having 
meanwhile concentrated upon philosophical and philological 



LIFE 5 

study, and producing during his two years there learned trea- 
tises which were published in the Rheinisches Museum ("Zur 
Geschichte der Theognidischen Spruchsammlung, " Vol. XXII; 
"De Laertii Diogenis fontibus," Vols. XXIII, XXIV). While 
in Leipzig he read Schopenhauer, and met Wagner. His uni- 
versity work was broken only by a period of military service. 
Before taking the doctor's degree, he was called to the chair of 
classical philology in the University at Basel, his philological 
work having attracted attention and Ritschl saying that he 
could do what he would. He was now twenty-four (1868). The 
Leipzig faculty forthwith gave him the doctor's degree without 
examination. After two years he became Professor ordinarius. 
He also undertook work in the Basel Padagogium (a kind of 
higher gymnasium). His acquaintance with Wagner now 
ripened into an intimate friendship — Wagner living not far 
away on Lake Lucerne. In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian 
war broke out, he could not serve his country as soldier, since 
he had become naturalized in Switzerland, but he entered the 
ambulance-service. Dysentery and diphtheria, however, at- 
tacked him — and the after-effects lingered long, if not through- 
out his life. In 1876, the year also of the Bayreuth opening, 
and when differences which had been developing with Wagner 
culminated, he was obliged on account of ill-health to relinquish 
his work at the Padagogium and in the spring of 1879 he re- 
signed his professorship in the University as well. He was at 
this time thirty-five, but to his sister who saw him not long 
after, he seemed old and broken, "ein gebrocliener, milder, 
gealteter Mann." His outer movements were thereafter largely 
determined by considerations of health. He spent the summers 
usually in the Upper Engadine, and winters on the French or 
Italian Riviera. He lasted nearly ten years, when he was over- 
taken by a stroke of paralysis which affected the brain (late 
December, 1888, or early January, 1889, in Turin). His nat- 
urally vigorous bodily frame withstood actual death till August 
25, 1900. 

Owing to current misapprehension a special word should be 
said as to his insanity. The popular impression among us is 
perhaps largely traceable to a widely read book by a semi- 
scientific writer, Dr. Max Nordau, entitled (in the English 



6 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

translation, which appeared twenty or more years ago) De- 
generation; in a chapter devoted to Nietzsche it was stated that 
his works had been written between periods of residence in a 
madhouse. The legend dies hard and lingers on faintly in the 
latest writers who have not made any real study of the case. 
The fact is, that the insanity came, as just indicated, suddenly, 
almost without warning, for his latest writings are some of his 
most lucid — and that nothing was produced by him afterward, 
save a few incoherent notes and letters, written or scrawled in 
the first days of his dementia. That there are any anticipations 
of the catastrophe (i.e., signs of incipient dementia) in his 
books is at best a subjective opinion — indeed it is a view which 
tends to be abandoned more and more. f Highly wrought Nietz- 
sche often was, particularly in his latest writings; he said ex- 
travagant things and uttered violent judgments. So did Car- 
lyle; so have many earnest, lonely men, struggling unequally 
with their time ; but insanity is another matter. 

The causes of his collapse were probably manifold. A few 
circumstances may be mentioned which may have co-operated 
to produce the result. Nietzsche himself mentions a decadent 
inheritance which he had from his father, though he thought it 
counterbalanced by a robust one from his mother. 5 While serv- 
ing his time in the Prussian artillery, he suffered a grave rup- 
ture of muscles of the chest in mounting a restive horse, and 
for a time his life was in danger. During the Franco-Prussian 
war, the illnesses already mentioned were aggravated by strong 
medicines that seem to have permanently deranged his digestion ; 
in any case, sick-headaches of an intense and often prolonged 
character became frequent. He had serious eye-troubles (he 
was always nearsighted), and became almost blind late in life. 
Strain of this and every kind produced insomnia — and this in 
turn led to the use of drugs, and of stronger and stronger ones. 
All the time he was leading the intensest intellectual life. 
Whether such a combination of causes was sufficient to produce 
the result, medical experts must judge. Nietzsche himself once 
remarked, "We all die too young from a thousand mistakes and 
ignorances as to how to act." 6 

6 Ecce Homo, I, §§ 1, 2. 8 WerJce, XII, 117, § 229. 



PERSONAL TRAITS 7 

in 

By nature he was of vigorous constitution. He had been 
fond as a boy of swimming and skating, and at the University, 
until his disablement, was an active horseback rider. At Bonn 
he appeared a "picture of health and strength, broad-shouldered, 
brown, with rather thick fair hair, and of exactly the same 
height as Goethe. " g He had strong musical tastes and some 
musical ability. A tender conscience seems to have belonged to 
him from his earliest years. When a mere child, a missionary 
visited his father's parish and at a meeting plead movingly for 
his cause ; the little Fritz responded with an offering of his tin 
soldiers — and afterwards, walking home with his sister, he mur- 
mured, "Perhaps I ought to have given my cavalry!" He 
was clean both in person and in thought. At school the boys 
called him "the little parson," instinctively repressing coarse 
language in his presence. He had a taste of dissipation at the 
University, but soon sickened of it. The delights of drinking 
and duelling palled on him, and openly expressed dissatisfac- 
tion with the "beer-materialism" of his fellow-students, and 
strained relations ensuing, appear to have had something to do 
with his leaving Bonn for Leipzig. Once he allowed himself to 
be taken to a house of questionable character, but became 
speechless before what he saw there. For a moment he turned 
to the piano — and then left. h Professor Deussen, who knew him 
from Schulpforta days on, says of him, "mulierem nunquam 
attigit" ; and though this may be too absolute a claim, 1 it shows 
the impression he left on one of his most intimate friends. He 
was never married. 5 He had, however, intimate relations with 
gifted women, like Frau Cosima Wagner and Malwida von 
Meysenbug, and his family affections were strong and tender; 
so unwilling was he to give his mother needless pain that he 
strove to keep his later writings from her. He had at bottom 
a sympathetic nature. If he warned against pity, it was not 
from any instinctive lack of it. In personal intercourse he 
showed marked politeness and, some say, an almost feminine 
mildness. All his life he was practically a poor man, his yearly 
income never exceeding a thousand dollars. He called it his 
happiness that he owned no house, saying, "Who possesses is 



8 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

possessed ; ' ' liked to wait on himself; despised the dinners of 
the rich; loved solitude, aside from a few friends — and the 
common people. Some of the latter class, in the later days of 
his illness and comparative emaciation in Genoa, spoke endear- 
ingly of him as "il santo" or "il piccolo santo." He had 
remarkable strength of will. Once, when the story of Mutius 
Scaevola was being discussed among his schoolmates, he lighted 
a number of matches on his hand and held out his arm without 
wincing, to prove that one could be superior to pain. After 
reading Schopenhauer, he practised bodily penance for a short 
time. Later on he asserted himself against the illnesses that 
befell him in extraordinary fashion, and when he became men- 
tally and spiritually disillusioned, he was able to wrest strength 
from his very deprivations. In general, there was an unusual 
firmness in his moral texture. He despised meanness, untruth- 
fulness, cowardice; he liked straight speaking and straight 
thinking. He did not have one philosophy for the closet and 
another for life, as Schopenhauer more or less had, but his 
thoughts were motives, rules of conduct. In his thinking itself 
we seem to catch the pulse-beats of his virile will. Professor 
Riehl calls him " perhaps the most masculine character among 
our philosophers." 7 He was not without a certain nobleness, 
too. He once said, "a sufferer has no right to pessimism," i.e., 
to build a general view on a personal experience. Nor was he 
dogmatic, overbearing — in spirit at least; I shall speak of this 
point later. He owned that he contradicted himself more or 
less. "This thinker [he evidently alludes to himself] 
needs no one to confute him; he suffices to that end him- 
self. ' ' 8 Nor did he wish to be kept from following his own 
path by friendly defense or adulation. "The man of knowl- 
edge," he said, "must be able not only to love his enemies, but 
to hate his friends." 9 In short, there was a kind of unworldli- 
ness about him, not in the ordinary, but in a lofty sense. I 
discover few traces of vanity in him (at least before the last 
year or two of his life), though not a little pride ; he cared little 
for reputation, save among a few; and he was not ungenerous, 

7 Alois Riehl, Friedrich Nietzsche, der Kiinstler und der Denker (4th 
ed.), p- 161. 

8 Mixed Opinions and Sayings, § 193. 

6 Thus spake Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 3. 



PERSONAL TRAITS 9 

saying toward the close of his life that he had difficulty in citing 
one case of literary ill-will, though he had been overwhelmed 
by ignorance. 10 I do not mean that his language is not severe 
at times, unwarrantably so; but he tells us almost pathetically 
in one place that we must not underscore these passages and 
that the severity and presumption come partly from his isolation. 
A lonely thinker, who finds no sympathy or echo for his ideas, 
involuntarily, he says, raises his pitch, and falls easily into irri- 
tated speech. k 

Perhaps I should add that the aphoristic form of much of 
his later writing has partly a physical explanation. 1 He was able 
to write only at intervals, and would put down his thoughts at 
auspicious moments, oftenest when he was out walking or climb- 
ing ; one year he had, he tells us, two hundred sick days. m Such 
ill fortune was extreme — afterward he fared better — but he was 
more or less incapacitated every year. He undoubtedly made 
a virtue of necessity and brought his aphoristic style of writing 
to a high degree of perfection — sometimes he almost seems to 
make it his ideal; it is noticeable, however, that in Genealogy 
of Morals, in The Antichristian, and in Ecce Homo he writes 
almost as connectedly as in his first treatises, and he appears 
to have projected Will to Power as a systematic work. The 
aphorisms are often extremely pregnant, Professor Richter re- 
marking that Nietzsche can in this way give more to the reader 
in minutes than systematic writers in hours. 11 

10 Ecco Homo, IV, § 1. 

11 Raoul Richter, Friedrich Nietzsche, sein Leoen und sein Werk (2d 
ed. ), p. 185. 



CHAPTER II 

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 



Nietzsche's life was practically one of thought. Of outer 
events, " experiences' ' in the ordinary sense, there were few: 
"we have not our heart there," he confesses, "and not even 
our ear. ' ' * But to the great problems of life he stood in a very 
personal relation. He philosophized not primarily for others' 
sake, but for his own, from a sense of intimate need. Body and 
mind co-operated. ' ' I have written all my books with my whole 
body and life; I do not know what purely spiritual problems 
are." "May I say it? all truths are for me bloody truths — let 
one look at my previous writings. " " These things you know as 
thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, but the 
echo of the experiences of others: as when your room shakes 
from a wagon passing by. But I sit in the wagon, and often I 
am the wagon itself. ' ' 2 These were private memoranda that have 
been published since his death, but an attentive reader of books 
he published often has the sense of their truth borne in upon 
him. As he puts it objectively in Joyful Science, it makes all 
the difference in the world whether a thinker is personally re- 
lated to his problems, so that his fate is bound up in them, or is 
"impersonal," touching them only with the feelers of cool, curi- 
ous thought. 3 So earnest is he, so much does this make a sort 
of medium through which he sees the world, that he once set 
down Don Quixote as a harmful book, thinking that the parody- 
ing of the novels of chivalry which one finds there becomes in 
effect irony against higher strivings in general — Cervantes, he 
says, who might have fought the Inquisition, chose rather to 
make its victims, heretics and idealists of all sorts, laughable, 
and belongs so far to the decadence of Spanish culture. 4 Some 

1 Preface, § 1, to Genealogy of Morals. 

2 Werke, XI, 382, §§ 590-2; cf. XIV, 361, § 231. 
8 Joyful Science, § 345. 

* Werke, X, 481, § 1; XI, 106-7, § 332. 

10 



SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 11 

have even been led to question whether Nietzsche was capable of 
humor. a But there is no need to go to this length. Not only 
does he give a high place to laughter in his books, not only are 
there special instances of humorous description to be found 
there, but colleagues of his at Basel, like Burckhardt and Over- 
beck, testify to his infectious laughter at their frequent 
meeting place (" Baumannshohle") , Nietzsche himself owning 
that he had much to make up for, since he had laughed so little 
as child and boy. 5 For all this the undercurrent of his life was 
unquestionably serious, and he cannot be placed among writers 
who give us much surface cheer. Occasionally he indulges in 
pleasantries to the very end of relief from graver work — such, 
for instance, as those which make a part of "The Case of 
Wagner" (see the preface to this pamphlet, where it is also 
said that the subject itself is not one to make light about), and 
those in Twilight of the Idols. In the preface to the latter 
he remarks that when one has a great task like that of a "turn- 
ing round (Umwert Jiang) of all values," one must shake off at 
times the all too heavy weight of seriousness it brings. 

As his motives in philosophizing were personal, so were the 
results he attained — some of them at least: they were for him, 
helped him to live, whether they were valuable for others or 
not. Referring to certain of his writings, he calls them his 
"recipe and self -prepared medicine against life-weariness." 6 
In a posthumous fragment (perhaps from a preface for a pos- 
sible book), he says, "Here a philosophy — one of my philoso- 
phies — comes to expression, which has no wish to be called 
'love of wisdom/ but begs, perhaps from pride, for a more 
modest name: a repulsive name indeed, which may for its part 
contribute to making it remain what it wishes to be : a philosophy 
for myself — with the motto : satis sunt mihi pauci, satis est unus, 
satis est nullus." 7 Sometimes he distrusts writing for the gen- 
eral, saying that the thinker may make himself clearer in this 
way, but is liable to become flatter also, not expressing his most 
intimate and best self — he confesses that he is shocked now and 
then to see how little of his own inmost self is more than hinted 

6 Cf. R. M. Meyer, Nietzsche, pp. 135-6. 

6 Nietzsche's Brief e, II, 566. 

7 Werke, XIV, 352, § 214. 



12 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

at in his writings. 8 He admires Schopenhauer for having 
written for himself; for no one, he says, wishes to be deceived, 
least of all a philosopher who takes as his law, Deceive no one, 
not even thyself. He comes to say at last, "I take readers into 
account no longer : how could I write for readers ? . . . But I note 
myself down, for myself." 9 "Mihi ipsi scripsi — so it is; and 
in this way shall each one do his best for himself according to 
his kind. " 10 At least this became an ideal, for he owns that 
sometimes he has hardly the courage for his own thoughts ("I 
have only rarely the courage for what I really know"). 11 

If I may give in a sentence what seems to me the inmost 
psychology and driving force of his thinking, it was like this : — 
Being by nature and by force of early training reverent, finding, 
however, his religious faith undermined by science and critical 
reflection, his problem came to be how, consistently with science 
and the stern facts of life and the world, the old instincts of 
reverence might still have measurable satisfaction, and life 
again be lit up with a sense of transcendent things. He was at 
bottom a religious philosopher — this, though the outcome of his 
thinking is not what would ordinarily be called religious. There 
is much irony in him, much contempt, but it is because he has 
an ideal ; and his final problem is how some kind of a practical 
approximation to the ideal may be made. He himself says that 
one who despises is ever one who has not forgotten how to 



ii 

The question is sometimes raised whether Nietzsche was a 
philosopher at all. Some deny it, urging that he left no sys- 
tematic treatises behind him ; they admit that he may have been 
a poet, or a master of style ("stylist," to use a barbarous word 
imported from the German), or a prophet — but he was not a 
thinker. 13 b But because a man does not write systematically, or 

8 Brief e, III, 277. 

9 Werke, XIV, 360, § 288. 
" Brief e, II, 567. 

11 Ibid., Ill, 274. 

12 Genealogy of Morals, III, § 25. Cf. Georges Chatterton-HilPs char- 
acterization, "Always an essentially religious nature" {The Philosophy of 
Nietzsche: an Exposition and an Appreciation, pp. 14, 114). 

13 So, among many, Paul Carus, Nietzsche and Other Exponents of 
Individualism, p. 101. 



SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 13 

even does not care to, it does not follow that he has not deep- 
going, more or less reasoned thoughts, and that these thoughts 
do not hang together. Nietzsche reflected on first principles in 
almost every department of human interest (except perhaps 
mathematics). Though his prime interest is man and morals, 
he knows that these subjects cannot be separated from broader 
and more ultimate ones, and we have his ideas on metaphysics 
and the general constitution of the world. Poets, " stylists, " 
prophets do not commonly lead others to write about their 
theory of knowledge, do not frequently deal, even in aphorisms, 
with morality as a problem, with cause and effect, with first 
and last things. Undoubtedly Nietzsche appears inconsistent at 
times, perhaps is really so. Not only does he express strongly 
what he thinks at a given time and leaves it to us to reconcile it 
with what he says at other times, not only does he need for 
interpreter some one with a literary as well as scientific sense, 
but his views actually differ more or less from time to time, 
and even at the same time — and Professor Hoffding is not quite 
without justification in suggesting that they might more prop- 
erly have been put in the form of a drama or dialogue. 14 Nietz- 
sche himself, in speaking of his ' ' philosophy, ' ' qualifies and says 
"philosophies," as we have just seen. And yet there is co- 
herence to a certain extent in each period of his life, and at last 
there is so much that we might almost speak of a system. There 
is even a certain method in his changes — one might say, using 
Hegelian language, that there is first an affirmation, then a 
negation, and finally an affirmation which takes up the negation 
into itself. Indeed, the more closely I have attended to his 
mental history, the more I have become aware of continuing and 
constant points of view throughout — so much so that I fear I 
may be found to repeat myself unduly, taking him up period 
by period as I do. 15 The testimony of others may be interesting 
in this connection. Professor Rene Berthelot remarks in the 
Grande Encyclopedic, though with particular to the works of 
the last period, ' ' They are the expression of a perfectly coherent 
doctrine, although Nietzsche has never made a systematic ex- 

14 Harald Hoffding, Afoderne Philosophen, pp. 141-2. 

16 I heard of a German book on Nietzsche not long ago — I cannot now 
remember its title — which disregarded the division of his life into periods 
altogether. 



14 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

position of it." 16 Dr. Biehard Beyer says, "His doctrine does 
not lack system but systematic presentation, which however also 
Socrates, a Leibnitz did not leave behind them. ' ' 17 Professor 
Vaihinger, who writes professedly not as a disciple, much less 
apostle of Nietzsche, but simply as an historian of philosophy, 
describes his book by saying, "I have brought the seemingly 
disorderly scattered fragments, the disjecta membra, into a 
strictly consistent system." 18 d Nietzsche himself, though ordi- 
narily too much in his struggles to grasp them as a whole and 
see their final import, occasionally had a clear moment and 
looked as from a height upon the sum-total of his work. Writing 
from Turin to Brandes, 4th May, 1888, to the effect that his 
weeks there had turned out "better than any for years, above 
all more philosophic," he adds, "Almost every day for one 
or two hours I have reached such a point of energy that I could 
see as from an eminence my total conception — the immense 
variety of problems lying spread out before me in relief and 
clear outline. For this a maximum of force is needed, which 
I had hardly hoped for. Everything hangs together, for years 
everything has been going in the right direction ; one builds his 
philosophy like a beaver — is necessary and does not know it. ' ' 19 
He once expressed a wish that some one should make a kind of 
resume of the results of his thinking, 20 evidently with the notion 
that there were results which might be put in orderly fashion. 
Professor Kichter describes his own book — the most valuable one 
on the philosophical side which has been written on Nietzsche — 
as a modest attempt to fulfil that wish. 21 But why argue or 
quote? Any one who cares to read on in these pages will be 
able to judge for himself whether and how far Nietzsche was 
a philosopher — no one imagines that he was one in the sense 
that Kant and Aristotle were. 

in 

I have spoken of Nietzsche's changes. He is strongly con- 
trasted in this respect with his master Schopenhauer, whose 

18 Art., "Nietzsche." 

17 Nietzsches Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe, pp. 34-5. 

18 Hans Vaihinger, Nietzsche als Philosoph, pp. 4-8. 

19 Brief e, II, 305-6. 

20 Ibid., IV, 170. 

21 Preface to the second edition. 



SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 15 

views crystallized when he was still young and varied thereafter 
in no material point. Only one who changes, he tells us, 
is kindred to him. ' ' One must be willing to pass away, in order 
to be able to rise again." 22 It is easy to misunderstand the 
spirit of the changes. Professor Saintsbury can see little in 
them but the desire to be different. 23 Nietzsche himself admits 
that he likes short-lived habits, hence not an official position, or 
continual intercourse with the same person, or a fixed abode, or 
one kind of health. 24 And yet the movements of his thought 
impress me as on the whole more necessitated than chosen. His 
break with the religious faith of his youth was scarcely from a 
whim. If one doubts, let one read the mournful paragraph be- 
ginning, ' ' Thou wilt never more pray, ' ' and judge for himself ffi 
— or note the tone of "All that we have loved when we were 
young has deceived us," or of "What suffering for a child always 
to judge good and evil differently from his mother, and to be 
scorned and despised where he reveres!" 26 So no one who 
reads with any care the records of his intercourse with Wagner, 
can think that he welcomed the final break. Rather was he 
made ill by it, in body and soul — it was the great tragedy of 
his mature life. 27 Giving up the ideas of free-will and responsi- 
bility was not from choice; even the idea of "eternal recur- 
rence" was first forced upon him. Almost the only region in 
which he felt free to follow his will was in projecting a moral 
ideal, and in the moral field itself he recognized strict limits. 
In general, he not so much chose his path as chose to follow it. 
He felt a "task," and the "burden" of his "truths." 28 "Has 
ever a man searched on the path of truth in the way I have — 
namely, striving and arguing against all that was grateful to 
my immediate feeling*?" 29 He opposed the artist love of 
pleasure, the artist lack of conscience, which would persuade us 



22 Werke, XII, 369, § 722. 

28 George Saintsbury, The later Nineteenth Century, p. 246. 

24 Joyful Science, § 295. 

25 Ibid., § 285. 

29 Werke, XIV, 231, §472; XIII, 220, §525. 

27 Joyful Science, § 279, beginning " We were friends and have be- 
come strange to one another," is supposed to refer to Wagner — I know 
of few more moving passages in literature. 

28 Cf. preface, § 4, to Human, All-too-Human; Werke, XIV, 413, § 293. 
28 Werke, XIV, 350, § 207. 



\ 



16 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

to worship where we no longer believe. 30 Nowhere perhaps more 
than in the religious field does feeling run riot today, nowhere 
does epicureanism, soft hedonism, more flourish — Nietzsche put 
it from him. He had the will to be clean with himself, hard 
with himself — he despised feeling's "soft luxurious flow," if I 
may borrow Newman's phrase, when the issue was one of truth. 
He regarded "libertinism of the intellect" as, along with vice, 
crime, celibacy, pessimism, anarchism, a consequence of deca- 
dence. 316 Sometimes his dread of being taken in seems almost 
morbid. For instance, in referring to the feelings connected 
with doing for others, not for ourselves, he says that there is 
"far too much charm and sweetness in these feelings not to 
make it necessary to be doubly mistrustful and to ask, 'are 
they not perhaps seductions?' That they please — please him 
who has them and him who enjoys their fruits, also the mere 
onlooker — this still is no argument for them, but just a reason 
for being circumspect. ' ' 32 Pleasure, comfort, the wishes of the 
heart no test of truth — such is hisi ever-recurring point of view. 
Indeed, instead of there being any pre-established harmony be- 
tween the true and the agreeable, he thinks that the experience 
of stricter, deeper minds is rather to the contrary. 33 Some- 
times his impulse to the true and real is a torment to him, he 
is hose towards it and declares that not truth, but appearance, 
falsehood, is divine ; M and yet the impulse masters him. Pos- 
terity, he says, speaks of a man rising higher and higher, but 
it knows nothing of the martyrdom of the ascent ; " a great man 
is pushed, pressed, crowded, martyred up into his height. ' ' ^ 
He views the philosopher's task as something hard, unwilled, 
unrefusable ; and so far as he is alone, it is not because he wills 
it, but because he is something that does not find its like. 36 "A 
philosophy that does not promise to make one happier and more 
virtuous, that rather lets it be understood that one taking 
service under it will probably go to ruin — that is, will be soli- 
tary in his time, will be burned and scalded, will have to know 

80 Preface, §4, to Dawn of Day. 

31 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 1041, 42, 43, 95. 

83 Beyond Good and Evil, § 33. 

88 The Antichristian, § 50. 

8i Will to Power, § 1011. 

85 Werke, XIV, 99, § 213. 

86 Beyond Good and Evil, §212; Will to Power, §985. 



SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 17 

many kinds of mistrust and hate, will need to practise much 
hardness against himself and alas! also against others — such a 
philosophy offers easy flattery to no one : one must be born for 
it." 37 Not all are so born, he freely admits, and he speaks of 
himself as a law for his own, not for all. He even says that 
a deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being 
misunderstood, for "in the latter case his vanity perhaps suf- 
fers, but in the former his heart, his sympathy, which always 
says, 'Ah, why will you have things as hard as I?' " M So inde- 
pendence is to his mind something for few, and one should not 
attempt it, unless ' ' compelled. " 39 So much did he feel that 
necessity hedges us about and that we must come to terms 
with it, that amor fati became one of his mottoes. 40 

IV 

And yet loneliness, and, above all, change in loneliness are 
not agreeable things, and it is impossible to avoid a sense of 
insecurity in the midst of them. With all his assurance Nietz- 
sche knew that his way was a dangerous one, and he had his 
moments of misgiving. He craved companionship and the sup- 
port that companionship gives. Once the confession drops from 
him that after an hour of sympathetic intercourse with men of 
opposite views his whole philosophy wavers, so foolish does it 
seem to wish to be in the right at the cost of love, and so hard 
not to be able to communicate what is dearest for fear of losing 
sympathy — "Mnc meae lacrimae."* 1 He had accordingly no 
wish to impose himself on others. He asks youthful readers not 
to take his doctrines forthwith as a guide of life, but rather as 
theses to be weighed; he throws the responsibility on them, 
urging them to be frue to themselves even against him, and 
saying that so they will be really true to him. 42 In the same 
spirit he says, 

" It lureth thee, my mode and speech H 
Thou followest me, to hear me teach? 

37 Werke, XIV, 412, § 291. 

38 Beyond Good and Evil, § 290. 
36 Ibid., § 29. 

40 Joyful Science, §276. 

41 Brief e, IV, 35-6. 

"Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, 442; cf. VI, 46, §23. 



18 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

Nay! Guide thyself — honest and fair — 
And follow me, with care ! with care ! " tt 

He regards it as part of the humanity of a teacher to caution 
his pupils against himself, and even says that a pupil rewards 
his teacher ill who always remains his pupil. 44 Knowing from 
his own experience how difficult it is to find the truth, having 
become mistrustful of those who are sure they have it, deeming 
such confidence indeed an obstacle to truth — knowing that one 
may actually have to turn against oneself in the higher loyalty, 
he holds those alone to be genuine pupils, i.e., genuine con- 
tinuers of a teacher's thought, who, if need be, oppose it. 45 He 
wished his own philosophy to advance slowly among men, to be 
tried, criticised, or even overcome. He felt that it was above 
all problems which he presented, and his most pressing pre- 
liminary need was of help in formulating them — "as soon as 
you feel against me, you do not understand my state of mind, 
and hence not my arguments either. ' ' 46 What a sense he had 
of the uncertainty of his way is shown in a memorandum like 
this : ' ' This way is so dangerous ! I dare not speak to myself, 
being like a sleep-walker, who wanders over house-roofs and 
has a sacred right not to be called by name. 'What do I 
matter?' is the only consoling voice I wish to hear." 47 He 
came to have a sense of the problematical in morality itself — 
just that about which most of us have no doubts at all (whether 
because we think, or do not think, I leave undetermined). 
j "Science [positive knowledge] reveals the flow of things, but 
» not the goal." 48 It has been proved impossible to build a cul- 
ture on scientific knowledge alone. 49 Hence he says frankly to 
\ us, ' * This is my way, where is yours ? The way — there is not. ' ' 50 
And yet it would be leaving something out of account if 
I did not add that in following his uncertain, venturesome 
way, Nietzsche experienced a certain elevation of spirit. It was 
the mood of the explorer — the risk gives added zest. He some- 

48 Ibid., VI, 42, §7 (the translation is by Thomas Common). 
44 Dawn of Day, § 447; Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 3. 

46 Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, 441, § 19; Dawn of Day, § 542. 
48 Werke, XI, 384, § 599. 

47 Ibid., XI, 385, § 603. 

48 Werke, XIII, 357, § 672. 

49 1 borrow here from Riehl, op. cit., p. 67. 
eo Zarathustra, III, xi, § 2. 



SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 19 

times uses a word that sounds strange on the lips of a thinker: 
''dance." It connotes for him joy, but joy that goes with the 
meeting of danger and risk. The dancer is a fine balancer, as 
when one treads a tight rope or goes on smooth ice. He ven- 
tures, goes ahead on a basis of probabilities and possibilities. 
Nietzsche speaks of bidding farewell to assured conviction or 
the wish for certainty, of balancing oneself on delicate ropes 
and possibilities, of dancing even on the edge of abysses. 51 Some 
think that by dancing he meant playing with words and arbi- 
trary thinking/ but it is something, he tells us, that just the 
philosopher has got to do well — a quick, fine, glad dealing with 
uncertainties and dangers is the philosopher's ideal and art. 52 
In a sense, all movement involves risk, even walking does, and 
dancing is only a heightened instance. It may be not quite 
irrelevant to remark that one of Nietzsche's tests of books or 
men or music was, whether there was movement in them or no, 
whether they could walk and still more dance; also that he 
himself liked to think, walking, leaping, climbing, dancing- 
above all on lonely mountains or by the sea where the paths 
were hazardous. 53 g He had a kind of distrust of ideas that 
came to one seated over a book, -and thought he had, so to speak, 
caught Flaubert in the act, when he found him observing, "on 
ne pent penser et ecrire qu'assis." 5 * The venturesome element 
in life, above all in the life of thought, only lent it a new charm. 
Though at first the large amount of accident and chaos in the 
world oppressed him, he came to say "dear accident," "beauti- 
ful chaos." For once he would have agreed with George Eliot, 

" Nay, never falter : no great deed is done 
By falterers who ask for certainty." 

The mind, he felt, reaches the acme of its power in dealing with 
uncertainties; it is the weaker sort who want the way assured 
beyond doubt. 55 

Because of his variations of mood, it is not easy definitely 

61 Joyful Science, §347. One recalls Shelley's words, "Danger which 
sports upon the brink of precipices has been my playmate." 

62 Ibid., §381. 
6 » Ibid., §366. 

Bi Ecce Homo, II, § 1; Twilight of the Idols, i, § 34. 
66 Will to Power, § 963. 



20 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

to characterize it. Professor Ziegler speaks of him as a "meta- 
physically dissatisfied" man, and Dr. Mobius has a similar 
view. 56 Nietzsche once spoke of himself as "profondement 
triste,." 57 It does not appear, however, that he was tempera- 
mentally melancholy; Mobius describes him rather as "san- 
guine-choleric/' 58 and his sister says (despite what I have 
already quoted) that he was given to playfulness and jokes as 
a boy — it was his thoughts, his disillusionment about men and 
things, that saddened him. With the shadow lurking "only 
around the corner for most of us — a skepticism as to life's 
value" (to quote Miss Jane Addams) 59 he was only too familiar. 
Let one read not only the passages I have already cited, but 
one in TJius spake ZaratJiustra beginning "The sun is already 
long down," 60 or a description of the proud sufferer, 61 or an 
almost bitter paragraph on the last sacrifice of religion, namely 
the sacrifice of God himself. 62 And yet he met his depression 
and triumphed over it. He suffered much, renounced much — 
we feel it particularly in the works of the middle period 63 — and 
yet he gained far more than he lost, and will probably go down 
in history as one of the great affirmers of life and the world. 
But his joy is ever a warrior's joy — it is never the easy serenity, 
the unruffled optimism of Emerson. 

59 Theobald Ziegler, Friedrich Nietzsche; P. J. Mobius, Nietzsche, 
p. 36. 

57 Briefe, II, 597. 

88 Op. cit., p. 56; cf. Nietzsche of himself, Werke, XI, 382, §587. 

69 The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, p. 103. 

60 II, x. 

61 Dawn of Day, § 425. 

62 Beyond Good and Evil, §55; cf. Will to Power, §§302-3. 

63 See preface, § 5, to Mixed Opinions and Sayings. 



CHAPTER III 

HIS "MEGALOMANIA," PERIODS, CONSTANT POINTS OF 
VIEW, SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY 



Nietzsche is sometimes charged with "megalomania." It must 
he admitted that he had, at least in sanguine moments, a high 
opinion of his place in the world of thought, and we should 
undoubtedly find it more becoming if he had left the expression 
of such an opinion — supposing there was ground for it — to 
others. The language is most offensive in private memoranda, 
in confidential letters to friends, and in the autobiographical 
notes, entitled Ecce Homo, which at first were not meant for 
publication and have only been given to the light since his 
death; still it occurs also in offensive form in a pamphlet and 
a small book which he published in the last year of his life, 
"The Case of Wagner," and Twilight of the Idols. Doubtless 
it would be fairer to Nietzsche to cite the various utterances in 
the connection in which they respectively belong, or at least 
at the end of the book after a general survey of his thought 
had been given, but it is convenient to take the matter up now. 
I begin with the utterances (I take only the more extreme 
ones) which he himself gave to the public — only noting that 
he called "The Case of Wagner" and Twilight of the Idols 
his "recreations," and that in general they contain, as M. 
Taine remarked in a letfer to him, "audaces et finesses," l which 
we need not take quite literally. In one of the passages, after 
confessing that he is worse read in Germany than anywhere 
else and is somewhat indifferent to present fame anyway, he 
says that what he is concerned for is to "get a little immor- 
tality" and that the aphorism and the sentence, in which he 
is "the first master among Germans," are forms of "eternity"; 
his "ambition is to say in ten propositions what every one else 
says in a book — what every one else does not say in a book." 

1 Brief e, III, 206. 
21 



22 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

In the same paragraph he speaks of his having given mankind 
"the deepest book it possesses, namely Zarathustra/ f and he 
adds that he is about to give it "the most independent' ' (proba- 
bly referring to The Antichristian) } In another passage he 
says generally that he has given the Germans their "deepest 
books" — and adds mockingly, "reason enough for the Germans 
not understanding a word of them." 3 In still another place he 
urges that German philologists and even Goethe had not com- 
prehended the wonderful Greek phenomenon, covered by the 
name of Dionysus — that he was the first to penetrate to its 
interior significance. 4 a 

Turning now to the material published since his death, we 
find him for one thing daring to put Aristotle himself in the 
wrong as to the essential meaning of tragedy — "I have first 
discovered the tragic." 5 Even as early as 1881, he confided 
to his sister his belief that he was the topmost point 
of moral reflection and labor in Europe. 6 He reiterates the 
belief to Brandes in 1888, saying that he fancies himself a 
capital event in the crisis of valuations ; 7 to Strindberg he even 
says, "I am powerful enough to break the history of humanity 
into two parts." b In Ecce Homo he becomes almost lyric in 
his confidence: "No one before me knew the right way, the way 
upwards; first from me on are there again hopes, tasks, ways 
of culture to be prescribed — I am their happy messenger." 8 
He notes of a certain day (30 September, 1888) : "Great vic- 
tory; a seventh day; leisurely walk of a god along the Po." 9 
He feels that he has had, and has been, an extraordinary for- 
tune, and writes with an extraordinary abandon and an almost 
childish irresponsibility — explaining who he is, how he has come 
to be what he is, why he has written such good books, and so 
on. It is as if he were somebody else and he were telling us 
about him. Let one note the account of the extraordinary 
mental conditions out of which the first part of Zarathustra 

2 Twilight etc., ix, § 51. 

3 "The Case of Wagner," 2nd postscript. 

4 Twilight etc., x, § 4. 

5 Ecce Homo, I, § 3 ; Will to Power, § 1029. 
8 Werke ( pocket ed. ) , VI, xxiv. 

7 Brief e, III, 285. 

8 Ecce Homo, III, ix, §2; cf. IV, § 1. 
8 Ibid., Ill, ix, § 3. 



HIS "MEGALOMANIA" 23 

arose. 10 They were like what prophets and revealers of divine 
mysteries may be imagined to have experienced in the past; 
most persons with such experiences would probably be turned 
into "believers" forthwith. Nietzsche, however, is cool, ob- 
jective, analytical in describing what he has undergone; it 
appears simply as a happy, supreme moment in his psycho- 
logical history — the account may well become a kind of 
classic for the scientific student of religious phenomena. In- 
deed, Nietzsche now makes special claims for himself as a 
psychologist — he is one "who has not his like." 11 In speaking 
of the seductive, poisonous influence of Christian morality on 
thinkers, inasmuch as they were kept by it from penetrating 
into the sources whence it sprung, he says, "Who in general 
among philosophers before me was psychologist and not rather 
the antithesis of one, a * higher kind of swindler/ an 'ideal- 
ist'?" 12 He indicates similar feeling about himself as a thinker 
in general — ranging himself with Voltaire, whom he calls, in 
contrast with his successors, a "grand-seigneur of the mind." 13 
German philosophers in particular he finds not clean and 
straight in their thinking — they never went through a seven- 
teenth century of hard self-criticism as the French had; they 
are all Schleiermachers — and "the first straight mind in the 
history of mind, one in whom truth comes to judgment on the 
counterfeits of four millenniums, ' ' should not be reckoned among 
them (I need not say that he means himself). 14 He is convinced 
of his future influence. He is "the most formidable man that 
ever was," though this does not exclude his becoming "the 
most beneficent." 15 He speaks of his sufferings, and adds with 
a touch of humor, ' ' one pays dear for being immortal ; one dies 
several times while one* lives. " 16 He looks forward to institu- 
tions where there will be living and teaching as he understands 
living and teaching — "perhaps there will even be chairs for the 
interpretation of Zarathastra." 17 His thankfulness to Sils- 
Maria (where Zarathustra was first conceived) would fain give 
it "an immortal name." 18 Little signs of vanity escape him. 

10 Hid., Ill, iv, §3. "Ibid., IV, §2. 

11 Ibid., Ill, §5. "Ibid., Ill, vi, §5. 

12 Ibid., IV, §6. "Ibid., Ill, § 1. 

13 Ibid., Ill, iii, §1. "Ibid., Ill, ix, §3. 
" Ibid., Ill, x, § 3. 



24 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

Women, he says, like him — all but the unwomanly kind ; 19 people 
who never heard his name or the word philosophy are fond of 
him — the old fruit-vendors in Turin, for example, who pick out 
their sweetest grapes for him. He is pleased with the idea of 
his being of Polish descent (Poles are to him ''the French among 
the Slavs") - 20 He is flattered at the thought of devoted readers ; 
"people have said that it was impossible to lay down a book of 
mine — I even disturbed the night's rest." 21 His anticipations 
of the future border on the grotesque. His Transvaluation 
[of all Values'] will be like a "crashing thunderbolt." 22 "In 
two years, ' ' he wrote Brandes in 1888, ' ' we shall have the whole 
earth in convulsions. ' ' 23 

Such is what Professor Pringle-Pattison calls Nietzsche's 
"colossal egotism" — I know no worse instances; he thinks it 
attained proportions not to be distinguished from mania. 24 It 
may be so, but one or two things should be borne in mind. The 
first is Nietzsche's addiction to strong language in general — 
particularly toward the close of his life. For instance, "Where 
has God gone? I will tell you. We have killed him — you and 
I ; we are all murderers, etc. ' ' K — it is his strong picturesque 
way of stating what he conceived to be the essential fact as to 
the course of modern philosophical thought, beginning with 
Kant. He amplifies the picture of coming "convulsions" by 
speaking of "earthquakes," "displacement of mountains and 
valleys." 26 He feels so foreign to everything German, that "the 
nearness of a German hinders his digestion." 27 He has a 
"horrible fear" that he may some day be taken for a saint, 
but he would rather be a Hanswurst — "perhaps I am a Hans- 
wurst. ' ' 28 Again, "I am no man, I am dynamite. i,2S He even 
says to his friend and helper, Peter Gast, "I consider you 

19 Ibid., Ill, §5. 

20 Ibid., Ill, § 2. 

21 Ibid., Ill, § 3. 

22 Ibid., Ill, x, §4; cf. Brief e, IV, 426. 

™ Brief e, III, 321; cf. Ecce Homo, III, x, §4. 

2 * A. S. Pringle-Pattison, Man's Place in the Cosmos (2nd ed.), pp. 
284-5. 

26 Joyful Science, § 125. 

26 Ecce Homo, IV, § 1. 

27 Ibid., II, § 5 
29 Ibid., IV, § 1. 
29 Ibid., IV, §1. 



HIS "MEGALOMANIA" 25 

better and more talented than I am." 30 Plainly we have to 
make some allowance for one who speaks in ways like these. 
Secondly, he also had moods quite different from those of 
" colossal egotism." In the letter to Brandes, in which he 
spoke of himself as a capital event in the crisis of valuations, 
he immediately added, "but that may be an error — more than 
that, a stupidity — I wish to be obliged to believe nothing about 
myself." He had doubts about Zarathustra; when the first 
recognition of it came to his knowledge, he wrote to Gast, " So 
my life is not a failure after all — and just now least of all when 
I most believed it." 31 At another time he confessed to Gast 
that there trailed about in his heart an opposition to the whole 
Zarathustra-creation. 32 As we shall see later, he puts forth 
almost all his distinctive views tentatively, and is rarely with- 
out skeptical reserves. 

The fact is that Nietzsche was not naturally a conceited 
being, and how he developed such a seemingly overweening 
self-regard, and what was its exact nature, is an interesting 
psychological problem. He wrote an old student friend, Frei- 
herr von Seydlitz, who was on the point of visiting him in 
Sorrento in 1877, "Heaven knows you will find a very simple 
man who has no great opinion of himself;" yet to the same 
person ten years later he used language about as strong as 
that already quoted — though adding "between ourselves. " e 
How is the development to be explained? So far as I can 
make out, the order of psychological fact was something like 
the following: 

Increasingly with the years Nietzsche became a lonely man — 
physically, and above all spiritually. d His old masters — 
Schopenhauer and Wagner — had failed him, and no one came 
to take their place. It is a mistake to think that he wished no 
master. His early feeling is shown in "Schopenhauer as Edu- 
cator," 33 and as late as 1885 he wrote his sister, "I confront 
alone an immense problem: it is as if I were lost in a forest, 
a primeval one. I need help. I need disciples, I need a master. 
It would be so sweet to obey! If I were lost on a mountain, 

30 Briefe, IV, 26. 

31 Ibid., IV, 150. 

32 So F. Rittelmeyer, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 176. 

33 Sect. 2. 



26 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

I should obey a man who knew the mountain; sick, I should 
obey a physician; and if I encountered a man who could en- 
lighten me on the worth of our moral ideas, I should listen to 
him, I should follow him; but I do not find any one — no dis- 
ciples, and masters still less ... I am alone. ' ' M He says else- 
where, "Why do I not find among the living men who see 
higher than I and have to look down on me? Is it only that 
I have made a poor search ? And I have so great a longing for 
such ! " ffi Even his thought of a disciple is peculiar. He writes 
to Peter Gast (sending him a manuscript), "Read me with 
more distrust than you ordinarily do, say to me simply, this 
will go, that that will not go, this pleases me, why that does 
not, etc., etc." 36 Once he makes a disillusioned thinker say, 
"I listened for an echo [i.e., some real reproduction of his 
thought] and heard only praise;" 37 but even praise was rare 
for Nietzsche. So far as his later books were noticed at all, 
they were put down as "eccentric, pathological, psychiatric," 
and as a rule they were ignored. Even rare men like Burckhardt 
and Taine could not really follow them — they had not, he felt, 
the same inner need with him, the same will. 38 Those who had 
been friends from youth up became, for one reason and an- 
other, and not always without his fault, estranged. He writes 
his sister, "A deep man has need of friends, at least, unless he 
has a God : and I have neither God nor friends. Ah, my sister, 
those whom you call such, they were so in other times — but 
now?" 39 He notes down privately: "No longer does any one 
live who loves me; how should I still love life!" This was 
after the publication of Zarathustra, when he also says, "After 
such a call from the deepest soul, to hear no word of answer — 
that is a fearful experience, from which the toughest might go 
to pieces: it has taken me out of all ties with living men." 40 
So (probably in the last year of his life), "It is now ten years — 

s * I cannot locate this passage in the Brief e, and must rely on D. 
Halevy, La vie de Frederic Nietzsche, p. 314; cf. Genealogy of Morals, III, 
§27. 

"Werke, XII, 219, §466; cf. XIV, 358-9, §223. 

86 Again I must rely on Halevy, op. cit., p. 334. 

• 7 Beyond Good and Evil, § 99. 

38 Brief e, I, 480, 495-6. 

98 Werke, XIV, 305, § 133. 

*° Will to Power, § 1040. 



HIS " MEGALOMANIA " 27 

no sound any longer reaches me — a land without rain. " 41 He 
feels shut up, cut off. ' ' How can I communicate myself ? . . . 
When shall I come out of the cave into the open? I am the 
most hidden of all hidden things." No longer can he be " elo- 
quent," he is like a cave-bear or hermit and talks only with 
himself, his ideas are acquiring a sort of twilight-color and 
an odor of buried things and of mold. 42 When he comes to 
Leipzig in 1886, he strikes his old friend, Erwin Rohde, as 
something almost uncanny: "it would seem as if he came from 
a country where no man lived. ' ' 

And yet he does not wish to take his experiences too 
tragically, does not mean to complain; his way, he is aware, is 
not a way for most, it is too dangerous; 6 and, as men and 
things are in Germany at the time, not even the few he hoped 
for have ears for him, their interests being elsewhere. He 
tries manfully to accept the situation, though not without some 
contempt for the general milieu that makes it necessary to do 
so. 43 Although he has longed and waited for a strong heart and 
neck on which he could for an hour at least unload his burden, 
he is now ready for the last (or first) lesson of life-wisdom: to 
cease expecting; and for the second: to be courteous, to be 
modest, thenceforth to endure everybody, endure everything — 
in short, to endure yet a little more than he had endured be- 
fore. 44 He even thinks that solitude may be useful for him — 
suspecting that, if a man can endure it, it tests him even more 
than sickness, i.e., hardens him, makes him great, if he has any 
capacities in that direction. 45 He had said in Zarathustra, 
"Away from the market-place and fame, all that is great be- 
takes itself ; away f rom^ the market-place and fame, the creators 
of new values have always dwelt." 46 Even the kindness of 
those who pity the solitary thinker and wish to make him more 
comfortable, to "save" him from himself, may be mistaken. 47 
Just to be himself and apart from the world, may be his highest 
duty to the world. Not to lead his time, or take a part in its 
conflicts, but to turn away from it and develop the idea of a 



41 Werke, XIV, 355, § 219. 4B Cf. Werke, XIV, 394. 

* 2 Ibid., 357, §221; 359, §225. "I, xii. 

43 IUd., 356-9. 47 Will to Power, § 985. 

44 Will to Power, § 971. 



28 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

new time, may be the greatest thing. Nietzsche had once put 
the idea in poetic form : 

"Destined, star, for radiant path 
No claim on thee the darkness hath! 
Roll on in bliss through this our age! 
Its trouble ne'er shall thee engage! 
In furthest world thy beams shall glow : 
Pity, as sin, thou must not know! 
Be pure : that duty's all you owe." 48 

At moments he could almost exult — at least he could quote the 
beautiful words of Isaiah, " ' exultabit solitudo et florebit quasi 
lilium";® and he even said (though, I fear, with something 
of bravado), "One has no right to have nerves ... to suffer 
from solitude. For my part, I have never suffered save from 
the multitude." 50 

And yet this "solitary" was bound by the most intimate 
ties to his kind, and one might almost say that love for his 
kind was final motive of all his thinking. What was the path 
of greatness for mankind? — that was his supreme question. 
How he worked out an answer, and what the answer was, it 
will be the effort of this book to explain. But with an answer 
he could not keep silent about it. He had to speak f — the 
burden was on him. Yes, it was his burden, — no one else felt 
it,j no one else gave the answer credence. Hence an acutely 
personal note in speaking of it. Sometimes a message sums 
up the aspirations of an age: then the individual communicat- 
ing it is unimportant. Sometimes, however, a message goes 
counter to an age, or at least speaks to deaf ears; then the 
individual becomes of capital importance. Nietzsche never 
separates himself from his word; but in the circumstances the 
word lent gravity to him. It was well, then, that men should 
know authoritatively of him, should understand how his won- 
derful fortune had befallen him, should be let into his inner 
thought and impulses. As if aware of this, he speaks freely 
to one or two friends, and he writes the extraordinary auto- 
biographical notes, Ecce Homo. This last was immediately 
only for his sister's eyes, who was at the time in South Amer- 

48 Werke (pocket ed.), VI, 56 (the translation is bv Thomas Common). 

49 Werke, XIV, 414, § 297 (quoting Isaiah, xxxv, 1). 
60 Ecce Homo, II, § 10. 



HIS "MEGALOMANIA" 29 

ica. In a letter to her he says, "I write in this golden 
autumn [1888], the most beautiful I have ever known, a retro- 
spect of my life, for myself alone. No one shall read it with 
the exception of a certain good lama, when she comes across 
the sea to visit her brother. There is nothing in it for Ger- 
mans. ... I mean to bury the manuscript and hide it; let it 
turn to mold, and when we are all mold, it may have its resur- 
rection. Perhaps then Germans will be worthier of the great 
present, which I mean to make them." 51 Afterward he 
changed his mind, and decided to print the book. Without 
doubt, it is a self-glorification, but the glorifying is because of 
the glory of his message and in view of the peculiar and tragic 
situation in which he found himself. To how slight an extent 
he cared for himself otherwise is shown in a memorandum: 
"For my son Zarathustra I demand reverence, and it shall be 
permitted only to the fewest to listen to him. About me how- 
ever, 'his father/ you may laugh, as I myself do. Or, to 
make use of a rhyme that stands over my house-door, and put 
it all in a word : 

" I live in my own house, 
have nowise imitated anybody else's 
and laughed at every master, 
who has not laughed at himself." 52 

It is as if he said, "Think of me as you will, but revere my 
work." Indeed, after finishing Ecce Homo, he tells a friend 
that now that he has got the record down, people had better 
not concern themselves any further about him, but about the 
things for which he lives (derentwegen ich da bin). 53 The fact 
is, the obtrusion of self was against his instincts. For long 
years, he testifies, he had not obtruded even his problems on 
the men whom he met, 54 and now he confesses that his habits 
and still more the pride of his instincts revolt against writing 
about himself as he does in Ecce Homo 55 — this though he says 
elsewhere that a great man may be proud enough to be un- 
ashamed even of his vanity. 56 g 

Hence, though vanity and personal resentment may have 

61 Werke, XV, x. Bi Werke, XIV, 350, § 208; 412, § 289. 

62 Ibid., XIV, 410. 8B See the preface. 
"Briefe, I, 538. 88 Will to Power, § 1009. 



SO NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

had their part in inducing him to write this strange book, 57 the 
main motives were deeper. He wanted to make clear who one 
with his extraordinary fortune was. " People confuse me," 
he says elsewhere, adding that it would be a great service if 
some one would defend and define him against these con- 
fusions ; but, as things were, he had to come to his own help. 58 
"Hear me!" he says in the preface, "I am so and so. Above 
all things do not confuse me with some one else ! " I will only 
add that though he magnifies himself, it is not as a superman, 11 
or as a messiah, or as the founder of a religion, but simply as 
a bearer of ideas and messenger of a new culture. Indeed, he 
sharply marks himself off from prophets and founders of reli- 
gions. 59 His underlying view is different. Men with great 
thoughts and inspirations in the past have usually attributed 
these to a Not-themselves, and masked their pride, or lost it, 
in humility. The divine in man they put outside him. "Not 
unto us, not unto us, but unto God be the glory," they said in 
substance. They may have been right, but Nietzsche thought 
otherwise. To him the ideas that came to him were his very 
self, the projection of his inmost will, and he, his self or will, 
was the outcome of a long course of purely natural evolution. 
This does not mean that he was without piety and reverence, 
but it was a natural and human piety, the reverence was self- 
reverence. At the same time the ideas might be detached from 
hinl individually and live after his self was gone. Indeed, to 
make them live on, to have them become seeds of a new human 
culture, was the practical meaning of his aim. Whether he 
overestimated his ideas and himself is another question. Per- 
haps he did. But the charge of megalomania or "colossal 
egotism" does not dispose of him. Others — particularly 
founders of religions — have spoken of themselves in far more 
swelling language than Nietzsche ever used; but we do not 
object to it, if we find it well-based — indeed, we do not call it 
"colossal egotism" at all. 1 

67 Cf. Briefe, IV, 172, and Meyer, op. cit., p. 384. 

68 Werke, XIV, 360, § 226. 

69 Ecce Homo, preface, §4; cf. Dr. Paneth's remark, quoted in note 
to Chapter XIII, at the end of this book. 



HIS PERIODS AND CONSTANT POINTS OF VIEW 31 

n 

Nietzsche's intellectual history falls, roughly speaking, into 
three periods. In the first, he is under the influence of Scho- 
penhauer and Wagner — the influence of the latter might be 
almost called a spell. It is the time of his diseipleship — lasting 
approximately to 1876. In the second, he more or less frees 
himself from these influences. It is the period of his emanci- 
pation — and of his coolest and most objective criticism of men 
and things (including himself) — continuing to 1881 or 1882. 
In the third, his positive constructive doctrine more and more 
appears. The early idealistic instinct reasserts itself, but puri- 
fied by critical fire. It is the period of independent creation. 
This division into periods is more or less arbitrary (particu- 
larly so are the dates assigned); something of each period is 
in every other; but change, movement, to a greater or less 
extent, existed in his life, and the " three periods'' serve 
roughly to characterize it. 

ill 

Beneath all changes, however, there were, as already hinted, 
certain constant points of view, and it may be of service to the 
reader to mention some of them briefly in advance. There was, 
for example, an underlying pessimism — so it would be ordi- 
narily called — and yet with it increasingly a practical 
optimism. Nietzsche felt keenly man's imperfection — more 
than once he even speaks of mankind as a "field of ruins." 60 
One thinks of John Henry Newman's readiness to credit the 
"fall of man" on general principles, so little did man's state 
agree with the notion of something Perfect from which he 
came. Nietzsche's sense of the perfect, however, simply shows 
itself in projecting a possible semi-Divine outcome of humanity. 
This, indeed, becomes a supreme and governing idea with him. 
From its standpoint the callings of men and men themselves 
are judged. Learning and science are not ends in themselves, 
nor do the rank and file of human beings exist on their own 
account. The scholar or man of science is a tool in the hands 
of one with a sense of the supreme values, the philosopher, 
90 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 6, Will to Power, §713. 



32 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

and slavery for the mass in some form or other is a condition 
and basis of higher culture. Culture, as something beyond a 
state of nature, is ever the ideal; and rule, not laisser faire, 
is the way to it. It is time to attempt an organization of 
mankind with the higher end in view. Present national or 
racial aims must be transcended — a human aim must overtop 
them ; j and a united Europe is the first step. Yet progress, all 
real social change, must be slow. "Everything illegitimate is 
against my nature,' ' Nietzsche once said; he even character- 
ized the "revolutionary" as a form of the "unreal." A new 
philosophy is the first requirement, and war, if it comes, must 
be for ideas. The general standpoint of Nietzsche might be 
described as aristocratic — Georg Brandes called it "aristocratic 
radicalism," and Nietzsche said that it was the most intelligent 
word about him which he had yet heard, 61 k though I cannot 
help thinking that Professor Hoff ding's phrase, "radical aris- 
tocraticism, ' ' 62 more nearly hits the mark. 

I may add that Nietzsche's mood at the end as at the begin- 
ning was one of hope. He criticised Goethe rarely, but he did 
so once in this way. The aged man had summed up his ex- 
perience of life by saying, " As children, we are sensualists; 
as lovers, we are idealists, who attach to the loved object quali- 
ties which are not really there; then love wavers, and before 
we are aware of it, we are skeptics; the remainder of life is 
indifferent, we let it go as it will, and end as quietists, as the 
Hindu philosophers did also." Nietzsche quotes the passage 
and adds, ' ' So speaks Goethe : was he right ? If so, how little 
reason would there be in becoming as old, as reasonable as 
Goethe ! Rather were it well to learn from the Greeks their 
judgment on old age — for they hated growing old more than 
death, and wished to die, when they felt that they were com- 
mencing to be reasonable in that fashion." He had been re- 
ferring to his early attempts to win disciples, and his "impa- 
tient hopes"; and "now — after an hundred years according to 
my reckoning of time! — I am still not yet old enough to have 
lost all hope" — what was gone was his impatience. 63 It was a 
noble mood — for his hope was ultimately a hope for the world ; 
so far he too obeyed "the voice at eve obeyed at prime." 

81 Briefe, III, 275. 82 Op. cit., p. 160. 63 Werke, XIV, 381. 



HIS SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY S3 

IV 

Nietzsche felt that he belonged to a spiritual line. He was 
grateful to those of his own time or century who had influenced 
him, and to the great spirits of the past whose blood was kindred 
to his own — indeed he was so conscious of being well-born in 
this respect, that he did not feel the need of fame. 64 His an- 
cestry he designates differently at different times. Once he 
speaks of four pairs of names : Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe 
and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. 65 
At another time he mentions Zarathustra, Moses, Mohammed, 
Jesus, Plato, Brutus, Spinoza, Mirabeau. 66 At still another, 
Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe. 67 It is interesting to 
note that the most constant names are Spinoza and Goethe, the 
next most constant Plato. Kant is not mentioned. This cannot 
mean that Kant had not influenced him, though more negatively 
than otherwise, and perhaps principally through Schopenhauer 
and Friedrich Albert Lange; with Kant's theoretic standpoint 
he was far more in harmony than with Plato's, but Plato's aris- 
tocratic practical philosophy appealed to him as Kant's demo- 
cratic, Rousseau-born ethics did not. Nietzsche confessed that 
he almost loved Pascal, who had instructed him unendingly; 
but he thought that Christianity had corrupted his noble intel- 
lect, though if he had lived thirty years longer, he might have 
turned on Christianity as he had earlier on the Jesuits. 1 

8 * Werke, XII, 216, § 456. 

85 Mixed Opinions, etc., § 408. 

68 Werke, XII, 216-7, § 456. 

67 Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 491, § 57. 



FIRST PERIOD 

CHAPTER IV 
GENERAL VIEW OF THE WORLD; THE FUNCTION OF ART 



In passing to the detailed study of Nietzsche's intellectual his- 
tory, we begin with him in Basel, where he is professor of 
classical philology at the University. He is happy in his rela- 
tions with his colleagues, and as a teacher he is uncommonly 
beloved. Professor Rudolph Eucken, for a time his colleague, 
recalls his "kind and pleasant manner " in examining students 
for the doctor's degree, "without in any way impairing the 
strict demands of the subject-matter." a Jacob Burckhardt, 
another colleague and well-known for his writings on the 
Renaissance and Greek culture, remarked at the time that Basel 
had never before had a teacher like him. b Nietzsche is par- 
ticularly happy in his intercourse with Burckhardt, who was 
mucji his senior. He is also happy in a friendship with Richard 
Wagner, with whom and Frau Cosima he often spends delight- 
ful week-ends at their villa above Lake Lucerne. His lectures 
are strictly professional, and only the few devoted to philolog- 
ical study attend them. 

At the same time his interests are wide, and he finds him- 
self wishing to do more than train efficient philologists. 1 The 
root-problems of life and the world engage him. He has at 
bottom the philosophical instinct, and philological study be- 
comes more or less a means to its satisfaction. Greek philology 
opens for him the door to Greek thought and speculation — 
enables him, he thinks, to reconstruct more accurately than 
would otherwise be possible the Greek view of life. The broader 
outlook appears in a preliminary way in his inaugural address, 
' ' Homer and Classical Philology, ' ' and it bore rich fruit in his 

1 Werke ( pocket ed. ) , I, xxviii. 
34 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE WORLD 35 

first published book, The Birth of Tragedy. It shows itself also 
in fragmentary minor studies — meant apparently for use in a 
work on Hellenism in general — on the Greek state, the Greek 
woman, competitive strife in Homer, philosophy in the tragic 
period of the Greeks (i.e., the pre-Socratic philosophers), all 
of which now appear in his published Remains. In addition, 
he writes two brief but pregnant studies of a more general 
character — one in aesthetics, "On the Relation between Music 
and Words," another in the theory of knowledge, "On Truth 
and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense." Aside from all 
this, he brings his ideas to bear on questions or tendencies of 
the day, and sometimes makes a decided stir in the intellectual 
world. It was so with a pamphlet attack on David Friedrich 
Strauss — and, though not so markedly, with pamphlets on ' ' The 
Use and Harm of History for Life," "Schopenhauer as Edu- 
cator," and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth." He calls them 
Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen, recognizing that the views he 
expresses are not in harmony with the spirit of the time. The 
new Germany after the Franco-Prussian war did not please 
him — it was too self-satisfied, materialistic, Philistine : the spirit 
was spreading to the educated classes, and even infected the 
veteran theologian Strauss. Philosophy was losing its old dis- 
tinctive character — giving way to history, criticism, scientific 
specialism. The cause of Wagner, which to his mind held 
such rich promise for the future, was having to struggle. 
Education was being perverted. He gave several public lec- 
tures on the latter topic and outlined more. Notes of this 
course and memoranda for still another Unzeitgemasse Betracht- 
ung, "We Philologists," make, along with the books and pam- 
phlets already mentioned and some private notes, the literary 
output of his first period. 

I shall now endeavor to state the general background of 
thought and feeling in these writings, and I shall follow the 
same method in dealing with the later epochs of his life. I am 
aware that in restricting myself in this way, I do more or less 
violence to Nietzsche. He was above all a creature of flesh and 
blood, and from my skeleton manner of treatment the reader 
will get little idea of the richness and varied charm of his con- 
crete thinking. But my purpose is a limited one, and perhaps 



36 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

all philosophy, or study of philosophy, is bound to be "grau" 
compared with "Lebens Farbe." 

n 

First, I may note that Nietzsche gives a distinct place to 
philosophy. It is not for him merely a vague general term, but 
has a special meaning. The philosopher is distinct from the 
scholar or man of science, as well as from the average unthinking 
run of men ; he is also distinct from the reformer. His impulse 
is that of theoretic curiosity, but the curiosity is not as to 
anything and everything, a mere blind undiscriminating appe- 
tite for knowledge turned loose on the universe; it is curiosity 
as to things most important, the things worthiest of knowledge.* 
In other words, in philosophy is already implicit the notion of 
value, and the philosopher is ipso facto a judge. 6 He is differ- 
entiated from the scholar as well as the ordinary practical man 
in that he seeks the great knowledge — the knowledge of the 
essence and core of things, of the total meaning and tune of 
the world; his effort is to give an echo to this tune and state 
it in conceptual form. f " Great" here is determined by the 
situation of man, the general character and circumstances of 
his life. As to this, Nietzsche felt much as Pascal had. Round 
about man, the heir of a few hours, there are frightful preci- 
pices and every step brings up the questions, Wherefore? 
Whither ? Whence ? 2 Philosophy is an answer — an attempt at 
an answer — to these questions; hence its rank. It is above the 
special sciences — is indeed their ultimate raison d'etre and the 
judge of their importance. Nietzsche is keenly conscious from 
the start of the subordinate rank of scientific specialism — as 
against the tendency to exalt it current in Germany at the time. 
Nor at first does he seem to doubt that philosophical truth can 
be got. g At the same time, the philosopher is thinker, judge, 
legislator, not practical reformer. 3 

/ The general conception of the world which Nietzsche first 
reached, however, is different from what most of us are accus- 
tomed to, and repels rather than attracts. We think — at least 
most of us try to think — of reason and intelligence as governing 

2 " David Strauss, Confessor and Author," sect. 8. 
8 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 3. 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE WORLD 37 

the world, of justice as its law, and of love as its driving force. 
But Nietzsche is unable to make out either a rational or a moral 
government of things. Change and undoing overtake all things, 
even the best and rarest : what is excellent is no more permanent 
than anything else. The world seems to him chiefly a blind 
striving of will, or rather of wills — wills, too, which strive with 
one another (save within certain limits) and more or less live 
off one another. He finds little that is worshipful or adorable 
in such a world (whether as it appears or as it inwardly is)/ 
Aside from awe before its vastness, it rather awakens pity. In 
reaching this result Kant's negative arguments against theology 
had affected him, but -at was the concrete make-up of the world 
that was the decisive thing — especially what Darwin has brought 
home to us English-speaking people, and what Schopenhauer 
had noted decades before. The ''horrible struggle for exist- 
ence" is often referred to. h The world was undivine. /Nietz- 
sche even speaks of this later as if it had been a first-hand inde- 
pendent conviction with him — of atheism as conducting him to 
Schopenhauer. 4 If so, Schopenhauer simply did him the service 
of formulating and grounding his conviction — i.e., of tracing 
back to their ultimate metaphysical origin the pain and wrong 
of the world, the general contradictoriness and impermanence 
of things. 

in 

How did Nietzsche react to such a view practically ? Careful 
attention to his various early writings seems to reveal two atti- 
tudes — taken either at successive times, or, according to his 
mood, more or less at the same time. The reaction that came 
first (if there was a first) was like Schopenhauer's own. He 
wished to renounce life, felt pity to be the supreme law, even 
inclined to practical asceticism 5 — and with it all had the dim 
sense of another order of things than this we know, one to 
which the negation of life somehow conducts. There are several 
passages of this tenor. 1 The other reaction was strongly con- 
trasted — it was a disposition to accept life and the world, even 
if they were undivinely constituted. Why this one came to 
predominate, it might be hard to say. One consideration and 

4 Ecce Homo, III, ii, § 2. 6 Cf . P. J. Mobius, op. cit., p. 58. 



38 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

another may have influenced him; but probably at bottom it 
was for a reason below or beyond reason — because the life- 
instinct (will to live) imperiously asserted itself in him. 
/ This affirmation of life in face of an irrational and unmoral 
world comes to be one of the most distinctive things in Nietzsche 
and should be noticed with some care. It is, of course, totally 
different from the cheerful acceptance of life which the Christian 
or the pious theist makes — different also from the temperamental 
optimism which simply looks on the bright side of things, dif- 
ferent even from the meliorism which looks for better and better 
things. Nietzsche, now at least, looks for no radical improve- 
ment, whether in the world at large or in the fundamental con- 
ditions of human life. 5 The poignant thing is, that our life, like 
all other life, exists and maintains itself by violence and wrong. 
We rob other things of existence that we ourselves may live, 
as truly as animals do — the best of us are parties to this vio- 
lence, the very saint could not live off the inorganic elements; 
if for a single day the race should really hold all life sacred, 
touching or despoiling nothing, it would straightway come to an 
end./ That is, Leben und M or den ist eins — living and killing 
are one. 6 Yes, the higher ranges of human life exist by more 
or less despoiling the lower ranges. Culture " rests on a horrible 
foundation. " 7 k It is only possible with leisure, and leisure for 
some means that others must work more than their share — and 
those who work for others' benefit rather than their own and 
have to, are really slaves. The culture of ancient Greece — the 
fairest the world has known — rested on literal slavery; essen- 
tially it is always so, is so today, though we may veil the fact 
from our eyes by speaking of "free contract." 

And yet to accept life on these terms is not easy and involves 
inner suffering. Some may feel that culture and the higher 
ranges of life are not worth the price that has to be paid for 
them — that if all cannot rise, it is better that none should. 
Indeed, the feeling may go deeper still, it may extend to the 
foundations of life itself — if life is necessarily of the general 
predatory nature described, we may think it better to be done 
with it altogether. So felt Schopenhauer, and so, at moments 
at least, Nietzsche. But a deeper impulse — something wild and 
*Werke, IX, 153, 7 Ibid., IX, 151. 



FUNCTION OF ART 39 

unmoral, if you will — urged him finally the other way. He 
took, chose life, even at this cost. 



IV 

The problem of the easement of existence, however, under 
conditions like these becomes a pressing one. And here Nietz- 
sche discovers a vital significance in art. Art is a kind of 
playing with the world; it consists in seeing it — in part or in 
iota — as in a play, making a picture or spectacle of it. So far 
as we follow this impulse, we disembarrass ourselves of our- 
selves and the world as immediate experience, and view every- 
thing as outside us, detached from us — we contemplate rather 
than experience, even the terrible we can look upon undis- 
turbed. 8 That is, the burden of actual life is momentarily 
lifted, and we may even enjoy rather than suffer. We may 
enjoy, though what we see would undo us, were it part of actual 
experience. It is Schopenhauer's doctrine over again. Still 
earlier Goethe had stated the essential principle of it: 

" Was im Leben uns verdriesst 
Man im Bilde gem geniesst." 

Nietzsche clings to it now. Art is not a fanciful thing to him, 
a luxury — it meets a vital need: by it we are helped to go on 
living. 1 Not only the thinker, the highly organized nature has 
this need, — all who suffer experience it, and particularly the 
great laborious mass, too easily tempted to insurrection or to 
suicide. 



Nietzsche's preoccupations are now with old Greek life, and 
he borrows illustrations for his view of art largely from this 
field.- Particularly does he attend to the religious festivals and 
the tragic drama. His view of the undertone of life among the 
Greeks, it should at once be said, is novel — at least to those of 
us who have our ideas chiefly from Winckelmann and Goethe, 
and think of "the light gracefulness of the old Greek pagan- 
ism" (Carlyle), or of their moral and religious life sitting 

8 Birth of Tragedy, sects. 22, 24, 25. 



40 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

"easily upon them like their own graceful garments' ' (John 
Fiske). A recent writer even says, "The ancient Greeks seem 
to have been incapable of taking life seriously. ' ' m But how do 
views of this sort agree with the spirit of the answer which the 
legendary Silenus gave to King Midas 's question as to what is 
best for man ? ' ' Pitiful race of a day, children of accident and 
sorrow, why do you force me to say what were best left un- 
heard ? The best of all is unobtainable — not to be born, not to 
be, to be nothing. The second best is early to die." Yet the 
answer long lived in Greek tradition, and the substance of 
thought underlying it is repeated by Simonides and by Soph- 
ocles. Indeed, how do the common views harmonize with 
Pindar's somber tone in speaking of the soul as being here in 
a mortal body because of ancient guilt — or with the ascetic 
tendencies which we discover in the Orphic cults and in Pytha- 
goreanism? From considerations of this nature, Nietzsche was 
led to conclude that there was an undertone of profound seri- 
ousness and even of pessimism among the ancient, particularly 
most ancient, Greeks (those before Socrates), and Burckhardt 
substantially agreed with this view when he characterized the 
Greek spirit as pessimism in world-view, optimism in tempera- 
ment. 11 At was then against a somber background that the art 
of the Greeks had arisen; indeed, Nietzsche held that it was 
in part just because they suffered as they did, because they 
felt with such particular keenness the anomalous and prob- 
lematical in existence, that their art grew to its extraordinary 
and unique proportions. / 

His view of Greek art, and particularly of the tragic drama, 
is of such interest, and hangs together so closely with his 
general philosophical view, that I shall give some details. 9 

The art-impulse which has been described he designates as 
the Apollinic impulse. Apollo, we remember, was a God of 
dreams, and under this impulse we see things as in a dream, 
i.e., detached from real experience. According to Lucretius the 

9 The data are in The Birth of Tragedy, to which (dispensing with 
special references, save in a few cases) I refer the reader. The whole of 
it should be read, and reread, by one who really wishes to get Nietzsche's 
point of view — or, I might say, to have an initiation into his way of 
thinking in general; and I regret to have to say that it should be read in 
the original — or at least in the French translation. 



FUNCTION OF ART 41 

Gods first appeared to men in dreams, 10 and Nietzsche regarded 
the Olympian family of deities as a kind of detached glorified 
vision of the commanding, powerful, and splendid elements in 
Greek life. They were hardly divine, in our sense of that term, 
that is, embodiments of justice, holiness, purity — any one who 
approaches the Homeric pantheon with Christian feelings, he 
remarks, is bound to be disappointed. The Greek rather saw 
in that immortal company himself over again and what was 
great, both good and evil, in his own life and experience, includ- 
ing the contradictions and tragic elements. 11 / Religion itself 
was to this extent like art — and it had the emancipating, reliev- 
ing, reassuring influence of art. The Gods, Nietzsche says 
sententiously, justified human life by living it themselves — the 
"only satisfying theodicy.'' There were besides epic narrative 
and sculpture and painting, all coming from the same picture- 
making impulse. The things narrated or represented might 
have elements of terror in them, but when thus projected and 
separated from actual experience, the main feelings in witness- 
ing them were of wonder and admiration. This would be the 
case, even if they corresponded in every single form and linea- 
ment to the realities they reproduced. Indeed, this kind of art 
observed the metes and bounds, the definite outlines and forms, 
of the actual world most scrupulously. 

But there was another art-impulse, to which Nietzsche 
gives the name Dionysiac — it is so much "another," that we 
may hardly see the propriety of calling it an art-impulse at all. 
Nietzsche's description of it is colored by Schopenhauerian 
metaphysics, and is not easy to follow for those who are not 
versed in the latter; but I shall try to make his meaning clear. 
Dionysus, as is well known, was outside the Olympian circle of 
divinities. His worship (the rites in his honor) was of an 
altogether peculiar character. It was not sober, orderly, and 
decorous, observing metes and bounds, like the worship of 
Apollo and Zeus, but a more or less riotous thing. There was 
dancing, and the music of the flute which accompanied it was 
very different from the music of Apollo's lyre. Exaltation 

10 It was in visions and dreams that the Hebrew God appeared to 
men — particularly to prophets (cf. Numbers, xii, 6). 

11 Cf. also Genealogy of Morals, II, § 23. 



42 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

came to the worshipers, a sense of oneness with the God, who 
was imitated in extraordinary acts; the lines which divide 
human beings from one another p and from the animal world 
were for the moment obliterated, the feeling of separate indi- 
viduality vanished, and a sense of universal kinship took its 
place. It was a state of semi-intoxication, often literal intoxi- 
cation — Dionysus was secondarily, if not primarily, a God of 
the vine, and ancient peoples, it must be remembered, often 
regarded drunkenness as a divinely inspired condition. 11 This 
was the joyous side of the Dionysian festival. But the joy was 
of a peculiar sort. It was over against a background that of 
itself would have bred melancholy and dejection. Dionysus 
• was a God of change, a God of the destruction involved in 
^change as well as of production and fertility, a hunter (Za- 
greus) bent on slaying, a devourer, a flesh-eater (sarcophagus or 
ri jujffTijs) ; yes, he was himself a suffering God and the dithyramb, 
or hymn in his honor, sang his mystical woes. r The joy of the 
festival was a joy following gloom — and this is the explanation 
of the excesses that marked it, its orgiastic traits. The winter 
revealed the God destroying, the spring came as a revelation of 
his creative power — and the spring was the time of his festival. 
The worshipers shared both in his pain and his pleasure, iden- 
tified themselves with the whole round of his life — on the one 
hand, fasting, hunting, devouring the flesh of wild animals ; on 
the other, dancing, reveling, and re-enacting his creative fer- 
tility. 8 It is evident that Dionysus, so taken, was a sort of 
epitome of life itself, a symbol of the world of change in general, 
and Nietzsche thinks that his worship had hence the highest 
significance, since it amounted to a reaffirmation of life in all 
its range, and a mystical identification of the worshiper with 
the very spirit of it. In a striking passage he sums up the 
Dionysiac experience/ substantially as follows: We know that 
everything that arises must await a painful end, we face the 
terrors of individual existence and yet are not benumbed, for 
a metaphysical consolation lifts us above the wheel of change; 
for a brief moment we become the Primal Being (TJrwesen) 
himself and feel his uncontrollable desire for and joy in exist- 
ence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction attending all phe- 
nomena, seem even necessary in view of the innumerable forms 



FUNCTION OF ART 43 

ever pressing and pushing into life, the boundless fertility of 
the World- Will ; at the very moment in which we are stung by 
the pain, we share also in the immeasurable creative pleasure; 
and so, despite fear and pity, we are happy and kept to life. 1 

/The Dionysiac experience is evidently very different from 
that of the Apollinic dreamer and seer, and the question is, 
what has it to do with art at all? Nietzsche says that the 
Dionysiac man is an art-work, not an artist. For he is not 
so much looking at life as in a picture and finding relief in 
detaching it from himself, as entering it afresh, re-experiencing 
its joy and its pain, saying yes even to what is tragic in it. 
In short, the Apollinic type man looks on life, the Dionysiac 
relives it... The truth is, the Dionysiac experience is material 
for art, it is a subject that may be artistically treated — and 
this is what Nietzsche really (or logically) means," the justifica- 
tion for his speaking of a second art-impulse being simply that 
the material has been so used. For out of the Dionysian 
festival grew that supreme form of Greek art, the tragic drama ; 
this may be briefly characterized as an Apollinic treatment- of 
the Dionysiac experience — a marriage of the two. If we fancy 
to ourselves a worshiper, who has wandered off from the rest 
in his intoxication and mystic self-oblivion, sinking to the 
ground for a moment, and, as he lies there, seeing himself and 
his rapt state and union with the God as in a dream, we have 
the Dionysiac experience and the rudiments of an Apollinic 
vision united in the same person. 7 It is just such a blending 
of diverse elements that lies, Nietzsche thinks, at the basis of 
Greek tragedy . w The chorus, as is commonly recognized, was 
the essential feature of the drama, and the chorus is really a 
transformed band of Dionysus worshipers. They are satyrs, 
even as the original worshipers dressed themselves in wild 
costumes to imitate the God. 12 The action on their part is 
entirely song and dance — the dialogue is an addition, and it is 
something in which they have no part.* The song is really a 
transformation of the original dithyramb, "the beautiful song 
of Dionysus," as Archilochus called it. According to what 
Nietzsche deems incontestable tradition, the sole subject of 
Greek tragedy in its very earliest form was the sufferings of 
12 Cf. also Erwin Rohde, Psyche, II, 15. 



44 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

Dionysus. He thinks that even when Prometheus and (Edipus 
appear on the stage, they are only a kind of mask for the 
original divine hero. /I will not go further into details. The 
essential point in Nietzsche 's interpretation is that the suffering 
and triumphing God (or world, or man — at bottom all are the 
same) is seen in vision and becomes a subject of art. The art, 
however, quite differs from the epos or any form of Apollinic 
art. The rhapsodist, equally with the painter and sculptor, sees 
his images outside himself. But in Dionysiac art, the artist and 
even the spectators of the drama imaginatively identify them- 
selves with, and become a part of, that which they see. All are 
for the moment participants in the divine drama spread out 
before their eyes. / 

/ In these ways, then, according to Nietzsche, the Greeks were 
helped to live, in face of the tragic facts of the world. One 
kind of art projected existence in a picture — and there came 
not only relief, but happiness in contemplating it. Another 
more daring kind led men, as it were, to live existence over 
again, to reaffirm even the tragedy in it — change, suffering, 
death — as a part of the eternal round. This was the most 
powerful and moving kind of art — in it the Greek found his 
supreme redemption from practical pessimism. Under the 
shadow of the Olympian deities, in the presence of great works 
of plastic art, but above all under the influence of the Dionysian 
festival and the tragic drama, the pain of existence was 
transcended, and life ennobled. / 



CHAPTER V 
ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 

In trying to reach the last elements of the world, Nietzsche 
manifests two tendencies in the writings of the first period. 
One is in the direction of metaphysics proper, the other in the 
direction of positivism or phenomenalism. Probably the meta- 
physical tendency came first, and he appears to have only 
gradually worked himself out of it. 1 I shall begin by con- 
sidering it. 



Nietzsche was never a materialist. He followed Kant and 
Schopenhauer in holding that what we call the material world 
is sensational in nature and subjective.* He criticises Strauss 
for his superficial treatment of Kant, and for his use of the 
language of crude realism. 2 b On the other hand, as against the 
total obscurity in which Kant had left the nature of ultimate 
reality, Nietzsche thought that he found light in Schopenhauer. 
Kant had said, summing up the results of his criticism, that 
the things we perceive are not what we take them to be, that 
if we make abstraction of ourselves as knowing subjects, or 
even only of our senses, all the qualities and relations of objects 
in space and time, yes, space and time themselves, disappear, 
that as phenomena they can only exist in us — hence what things 
are independently of us remains wholly unknown. Such an 
outcome, when it is really taken to heart and not left as an 
incident in an abstract logical process, is extremely depressing. 
If one cannot accept Kant's counterbalancing ethical reason- 
ings, one is left in total gloom — unless, indeed, one becomes a 

1 As we shall see, he returns to a modified form of metaphysics in 
his last period. 

2 " David Strauss etc.," sect. 6. 

45 



46 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

complete idealist and gives up the idea of extra-mental reality- 
altogether. The depressing influence of Kant's criticism was 
felt to the full by Heinrich von Kleist — Nietzsche quotes a 
moving passage from him. 3 He himself, however, escaped it by 
the help of Schopenhauer. "Ultimate reality proved, indeed, to 
be very different from what he had been brought up to believe, 
but he could at least make out its outline, could see his own 
place in the general framework and find a meaning for his life. 
To quote the substance of his language, Schopenhauer was a 
guide to lead him from skeptical depression and criticising 
renunciation up to the heights of the tragic view, with the 
heavens and unnumbered stars overhead; once more he ob- 
tained the sense of life as a whole and learned where consolation 
was to be found for one's individual limitations and pain, 
namely, in sacrificing egoism and surrendering oneself to noble 
aims, above all those of justice and pity. 4 

I need not here repeat the fundamental propositions of 
Schopenhauer's metaphysics which Nietzsche adopted. The 
reality lying back of the world of sensations, and also of our- 
selves (to the extent we are distinguishable from sensations), 
is will — one will, indeed, since space and time, the conditions 
of multiplicity, are regarded as subjective forms. d The will 
simply appears in many objects, simply appears in the form 
of many wills — change, alternate life and death, the general 
evanescence of things are all but appearance. The view 
had so far a consoling and elevating effect on Nietzsche: 
as against the whole realm of the transitory and fugitive, 
he was able to assert an abiding, eternal energy that 
was real. 6 But how, it may be asked, under ultimate con- 
ditions such as these do appearances ever arise? How does it 
come to pass that the Primal Unity (das TJr-Eine) gives birth 
to them? At this point Nietzsche is speculative and venture- 
some even beyond his master, who had only spoken vaguely of 
a fall (Abfall), and developes a view which stands in marked 
contrast to theistic, or at least Christian, metaphysics. He 
premises that the Primal Will, like its human counterpart, of 
which it is indeed only the inmost essence, is a striving will, 
that is, something unsatisfied, something that suffers. The dis- 

8 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 3. * Ibid., sect. 3. 



ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 47 

satisfaction and suffering are that which urge it on. 5 Schopen- 
hauer once tells of the way in which as a youth he had sought 
now and then to look at himself and his doings as things apart 
from him, to make a picture of them — he supposes with the idea 
of finding them more enjoyable; 6 perhaps the experience has 
not been his alone. Well, Nietzsche dares suggest that the 
World-Will is in an essentially similar situation, that it too is 
led to make a picture, an object of itself, to thus project itself in 
the form of a vision or dream — and that it is this vision or 
dream which we and the world are. We and the world are the 
Eternal One, only not as he exists in himself, but as spread out 
in space and time for his contemplation — for all objectification 
requires these forms, at least the form of space, as a condition. 
"In the dream of the God, we are figures who divine what he 
dreams.' ' And yet because the vision is a result, is ever being 
projected and never is, a certain inconstancy and change belong 
to the world's essential nature — it and all its parts are ever 
arising, ever passing away, ever freshly arising; there is birth, 
death, rebirth in it without end. f 

A fanciful metaphysics, we say, and Nietzsche himself 
thought so later — and yet, perhaps, not much more fanciful than 
some other species of the genus. It has points of contact with 
Fichte's — the World-Will might be called an Absolute Ego who 
creates all things out of himself; and yet it is essentially 
different from Fichte's, or any moral metaphysics, and for 
something at all like it we may have to go back as far as 
Heraclitus. It might be described as an aesthetic metaphysics 
(Nietzsche spoke of it afterward as an Artist en-Met a~ 
physik). 7 The world is there because of an aesthetic need of 
its creator; and the way in which we in turn must justify it 
(if we justify it at all) is by conceiving of it aesthetically, 
converting it into a picture ourselves, repeating thus in principle 
the act of its creator, experiencing anew his pain and his 
creative joy. g For we cannot give a rational justification to the 
world — it did not originate in reason and shows no rational 

5 Cf. The Birth of Tragedy, sects. 4, 5; Werke, IX, 153; also a later 
reference to the early view in Zarathustra, I, iii. 

6 Schopenhauer's Werke (Frauenstadt ed.), Ill, 425. 

7 " Attempt at Self-Criticism/' § 5, prefixed to later editions of The 
Birth of Tragedy. 



48 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

order in its ceaseless play of change and destruction. As little 
can we give it a moral justification — life lives off life, immorality 
is an essential part of its constitution. But take it as an 
aesthetic phenomenon, look at it as a picture, and you may see 
some sense in it. Eegard its creator not as a Supreme Reason 
or a Moral Governor, but as a supreme Artist, and you get some 
real insight into its make-up. For the world is a kind of play, 
a ceaseless producing and destroying like that of a child making 
and unmaking his piles of sand for the pleasure of the game, 
or that of an artist who creates and has ever to create anew. 
In some such way Heraclitus seems to have viewed the world. 
The Mon, the eternal child Zeus, was there at play, naiS naiZaov. 
If, says Nietzsche, Heraclitus had been asked, why the fire did 
not remain fire, why it was now fire, now water, now earth, he 
could only have answered, "It is a play — don't take it too 
pathetically, and above all not morally ! " 8 h 

n 

Such was one current of Nietzsche's thinking. But there 
was another, perhaps at the start simply running alongside 
of it, but later becoming the main stream. This was in the 
direction of a renunciation of metaphysics altogether. The 
turning-point for Nietzsche was as to whether there was actu- 
ally first-hand knowledge of the will. Schopenhauer had said 
that while in general we know things only as they appear, we 
know the will as it is (or at least as mediated through the mere 
forms of space and time) — know it immediately, by direct self- 
feeling. But Nietzsche becomes more and more dubious on this 
point. He asks whether it is not mere ideas, pictures (Vorstell- 
ungen), which we have here as everywhere else. He thinks 
that when we look closely within us, we realize that the life of 
our impulses, the play of our feelings, affects, acts of will, is 
known to us only through pictures which we form of them, 
not in their own nature. 9 He hesitates when he comes to pain, 
but he concludes that here too we have only an image. 10 * Hence 
we have direct knowledge of reality nowhere. Schopenhauer's 

8 " Philosophy in the Tragic Period of the Greeks," sect. 7. Cf. a 
later reference, Will to Power, § 797. 
8 Werke, IX, 214; cf. XII, 25, §43. 
10 Ibid., IX, 189, § 129; cf. p. 197. 



ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 49 

"will," while it may be more elementary than other phenomena, 
is still phenomenal, "the most general phenomenal form of 
something that is otherwise entirely undecipherable. ' ' u 

Thus the basis for a metaphysical construction fails altogether, 
and Nietzsche really falls back into the purely negative attitude 
that is the outcome of Kant's criticism, from which Schopen- 
hauer had temporarily delivered him. It is likely that some 
time was required for this anti-metaphysical attitude to establish 
itself definitively. He had read as a student at Leipzig Lange 's 
History of Materialism. — read it twice over, and thoroughly 
absorbed its leading ideas. One of the characteristic points of 
view of this remarkable book is that, granting that man cannot 
know ultimate reality, he may lawfully exercise his imagination 
upon it in order to satisfy the needs of his heart (Gemuth) — 
may poetize about it. We find Nietzsche sometimes speaking 
of philosophy, accordingly, as art rather than knowledge, as 
kindred to poetry and religion. The essentially Schopenhauerian 
metaphysics, which has just been described, may have been held 
by him as poetry in this way, after he had ceased to believe 
in it literally — as philosophers sometimes do now with the 
religious beliefs of their youth. There is a fragment belonging 
to this time, entitled "Critique of the Schopenhauerian phi- 
losophy," in which, after asserting that Schopenhauer as little 
as his predecessors had reached the final reality of things, he 
says that his system has the value of a poetic intuition rather 
than of a logical argumentation. 3 Indeed, it is possible to hold 
that Nietzsche never took the Schopenhauerian metaphysics 
literally, and that his special variety of it, Artist en-Meta- 
physik, was but a poetic play. The question is one of literary 
interpretation. The probability seems to me to be that he 
cherished the belief originally and then felt obliged to modify 
it, and at last to give it up altogether. 11 In the succeeding 
period of his life we do not hear of it even as poetry. 

in 

In turning away from metaphysics proper, Nietzsche de- 

velopes interesting, if not absolutely novel, views of the sensible 

11 Ibid., IX, 214. Cf. ibid., IX, 108, § 65; 204, § 147; 194, § 137 ("the 
whole world is phenomenon, through and through, atom on atom, without 
interval ") . 



50 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

world itself. 12 They look in the direction of an extreme phe- 
nomenalism — one might almost call them, in contrast with our 
common-sense realistic views, illusionism. 

What is the relation of a sensation, say a color sensation, to 
the object that calls it forth ? Nietzsche occupies himself much 
with the question. He does not doubt that there is an object, 
i.e., something or other which exists independently of ourselves 
— his question is simply, does the sensation reveal it, present it 
as it is? His reasoning is somewhat as follows: Mediately, we 
have a certain stimulation of the nerve-centers; 13 when this 
has taken place, somehow the sensation, color, arises. No one 
supposes that the color has any special resemblance to the brain- 
tremors that occasion it — what reason, then, is there for sup- 
posing that it resembles the still more remote inciting cause? 1 
We give the sensation a name, i.e., we describe it to ourselves 
or to one another by a certain sound, but what resemblance has 
a sound to an actual color ? The two things belong to disparate 
spheres — all we can say is that the sound is a sign, symbol, or 
metaphor for the color. But if this is so, why may not the 
color itself be a sign, symbol, or metaphor for the ultimate 
object rather than anything else — these two things also belong- 
ing to disparate spheres ? m Sometimes we imagine that we 
come nearer objective truth, when instead of mere sensations 
of things we form concepts of them — we think that we thus 
leaVe aside their secondary and accidental features and reach 
their real essence. But what is a concept? It is something we 
form when, taking a number of comparatively like experiences — 
sensible or sensational experiences in this case — we fasten our 
attention on their points of resemblance, leave out of account 
their differences, and make the resemblances stand out as a 
quasi-whole by themselves; this then we say they all share in 
alike, this is their essential idea and the essential being of each 
particular one. But is this being or idea anything that goes 
back of the experiences and explains them? Is it not itself 

12 Some of them appear in the fragment, " On Truth and Falsehood 
in the Extra-moral Sense" (Werke, X, 189-207); statements in the text 
are based on this, when not credited to other sources. 

13 Nietzsche here uses the customary physiological datum — as to the 
qualifications needed from a more ultimate point of view, see note b to 
this chapter (at the end of the book). 



ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 51 

something sensational in nature, though the sensations are now 
pictured, thought, rather than immediately felt? — is it more 
than an attenuated schema of them? Yet if this is so, how do 
concepts bring us in the slightest degree nearer the objective 
reality of which we are in search? So far as they are related 
to it, is it not a poorer, more beggarly relation than the indi- 
vidual sensible experience itself, since they are constituted just 
by leaving all that made the experience individual and distinct 
out of account? 

What then does our so-called knowing amount to ? To speak 
of literal correctness, as of a picture to its original, is out of 
the question. ''First a nervous stimulus turned into an image 
[e.g., a color]. Metaphor number one. Then the image trans- 
formed into a sound. Metaphor number two. And each time, 
a complete leaping from one sphere into an entirely different 
one." "We think that we know something about things, when 
we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, and in truth we 
have nothing but metaphors which have no correspondence 
whatever to the original realities." As for a concept, it is little 
better than a "residuum" of a metaphor — it is more a skeleton 
or a ghost, than a real thing; once Nietzsche describes it as the 
"burial place" of the living experience. Of course, the various 
concepts in which the varied experiences of men are summed up, 
may be put in order, and they may make an imposing array, 
but it is the array of a "Roman columbarium." [One thinks 
involuntarily, or, shall I say? maliciously, of a Logic like 
Hegel's."] 

In other words, and speaking perhaps with offensive plain- 
ness, our "knowledge" is illusion, falsehood. We stand in an 
essentially aesthetic relation rather than any other to reality — 
we are primarily poets, builders, creators. Nietzsche sometimes 
uses the word "falsehood" (Luge), sometimes "play" (Spiel) 
— the thought in both expressions is the same. 14 Our "truth" 
is a "mobile throng of metaphors, metonymies, anthropo- 
morphisms, in short a lot of human relations which have been 
poetically and rhetorically heightened, translated, adorned, and 

14 R. M. Meyer remarks that Nietzsche's use of the word Luge recalls 
one of Herder's " genialsten " writings, " Ueber die dem Menschen ange- 
borene Luge." 



52 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

after long use seem to a people fixed, canonical, and binding: 
truths are illusions, the origin and nature of which have been 
forgotten, metaphors that have no longer the moving effect of 
metaphors, coins that have lost their image and superscription 
and now are looked upon as metal, no more as coin. ' ' Concepts 
have, if not their mother, then their grandmother, in these 
illusory images. Even ''being," which Nietzsche thinks orig- 
inally meant " breathing," comes from a metaphor. 15 We do 
not even know the real nature of our own bodies, nature "has 
thrown the key away" — we only play or fumble on the surface 
of things here as everywhere else. 

IV 

What then is the human intellect for, if truth is beyond its 
power ? Nietzsche 's answer in brief is that it is to give us prac- 
tical guidance in life. It is a useful tool to this end; it did 
not arise to serve theoretic purposes. It observes how things 
affect us, noting particularly whether they harm or help us, 
and draws up from this very personal angle of vision a picture 
or scheme of things, by the help of which we can thread our 
way through life's mazes a little more assuredly— conceptualiz- 
ing and logicizing the material, so that we may handle it more 
easily. There would be nothing to say against this pictured, 
logicized world, did we not proceed to take it for what it is not. 
We think that it is something independent of us, something 
that would be here in all its particulars just the same whether 
we were here or not. Color, sound, sweet and sour, hard and 
soft, heavy and light, we think that we simply find, — that we 
have no hand in constituting them. I have known people to 
grow angry when it was suggested that a sound they hear is 
not something altogether apart from them — so instinctive has 
the view become. That is, we believe what is not true, we are 
deceived. It is not deception that is practised upon us — we 
deceive ourselves; ultimately it is the intellect that is the de- 
ceiving party. It does its work so thoroughly that we are not 
aware, unless we critically examine ourselves, that there is any 
deception in the matter. 

What conclusion is to be drawn ? Is the deception therefore 
18 "Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 11. 



ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 53 

to be rejected? By no means. The intellect has worked in the 
interests of life. It is easier for men to live, when they project 
their experience outside themselves; they feel that they have 
thereby something to steady themselves by and to lean upon. 
Indeed, a tendency to deception exists more or less in life in 
general. We have all heard of the various protective devices 
of the lower forms of life; sometimes they are the finest forms 
of defense, and quite take the place of weapons like horns or 
poisonous fangs. But the most perfect kind of deception would 
be that practised by a being on itself, — the real nature of the 
process being either unrealized, or if realized, soon obscured to 
the mind. This is the deception which man practises on himself 
in relation to the sensible and conceptual world. It is all in 
the interests of life — most men could hardly live without it; 
and it has as much right to be as truth — indeed more right 
to be, in the particular circumstances envisaged. Illusion, de- 
ception, as part of the life-process and legitimate — such is 
Nietzsche 's point of view at the present time : argument to this 
effect makes the substance of the pregnant fragment, "On 
Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral [i.e., theoretic] 
Sense/' 

Indeed he has now such a sense of the function of illusion 
in the world, that he defends it in connections where many of 
us would feel the sole imperative of truth. For example, in 
discussing the use and harm of history for life, he questions 
the benefit for men in general of pushing historical study to its 
last extremes. If reality is made to stand out in all its naked- 
ness, if illusions are totally banished, reverence and the power 
of joyful activity suffer. He has in mind particularly the 
study of religious origins. He speaks of the dissolving influ- 
ence of the new historical theology — here is perhaps a sub- 
sidiary reason for the attack on Strauss. A religion that is 
turned into a piece of historical knowledge simply is, he thinks, 
at the end of its way. A loving constructive spirit should go 
along with all destruction. He is even critical toward modern 
science in the same spirit. The doctrines of change as a sov- 
ereign law, of the fluidity of all types and species, of the 
absence of all cardinal distinction between man and animal, he 
calls "true, but deadly"; and he thinks that life ruled by 



54 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

science may possibly be far less life and far less assured of the 
future, than life controlled by instincts and powerful illusions. 
If it came to the worst, if a choice had to be made between 
knowledge at the expense of life and life at the expense of 
knowledge, he would not hesitate to give life the higher place — 
a knowledge that worked destructively on life would indeed 
in the end destroy itself. 16 

The foregoing considerations relate to truth in the theoretic 
sense. Truth in the moral sense is a different matter. Its 
origin is utility. Men live in society — have to, to live at all. 
They must then understand one another ; to this extent at least 
they must put an end to the helium omnium contra omnes. 
That is, they must use words in the same senses. When one 
person says " green " or "loud" or "cow" or "horse," he must 
mean what others mean by the same words. To speak "truly" 
is to agree with others, to conform to the general conventions. 
Language gave the first laws of truth ; here the contrast between 
truth and falsehood first arose. But the conventions of speech 
have little or nothing to do with truth in the sense first men- 
tioned — they had their origin in other than theoretic considera- 
tions. Speaking "truly" to one's fellow-man involves nothing 
as to giving a true, i.e., faithfully objective, report of things. 
German speech attributes a male gender to the tree and a female 
gender to the plant — how unwarrantable to draw theoretic con- 
clusions therefrom! In fact truth in the moral (social) sense 
is entirely compatible with falsehood in the other sense; it 
means nothing more than that one faithfully uses the cus- 
tomary metaphors, i.e. (speaking now in more ultimate terms), 
that one falsifies as the flock does in a way recognized as binding 
upon all. 

Yes, the needs of the flock not only cover up theoretic false- 
hood of the sort described, but they breed, or have bred, illusions 
on their own account. I have just used the phrase "binding 
upon all." But anything "binding" naturally brings along 
with it the idea that those who are bound can heed the obliga- 
tion, that it is in their power to comply with it, whether they 
actually do or not — and this idea, when further developed and 
connected with obedience to the standards of the flock in gen- 
1 ° " The Use and Harm of History for Life," sects. 7, 9, 10. 



ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 55 

eral, becomes the notion of free-will and responsibility, which 
plays so large a part in the spiritual economy of early com- 
munities. Free-will is an illusory notion to Nietzsche, and 
indeed to most thinkers of the first rank in recent times 
(William James being a rare and brilliant exception), yet 
society for its successful working had to proceed as if it were 
true. On the basis of it praise and blame, reward and punish- 
ment were distributed and men's characters shaped (to the 
extent they were shaped at all), men's own efforts for the 
better going on the assumption of its truth also. When Nietz- 
sche speaks of morality as necessary falsehood (Nothlilge) , and 
says that without the errors connected with it man would have 
remained on the animal level, he has this error particularly in 
mind. 17 

The field of illusion is thus wide, and the question may be 
raised, What matters it? If men have ideas to live by, and 
perhaps grow better by, is that not enough? Well, perhaps it 
is enough for most of us — we have no impulses urging us to go 
further, and if we had them, should perhaps only perplex our- 
selves needlessly in yielding to them, since we have scarcely the 
leisure or the ability to push our inquiries to a finish. p But 
there are others who have imperious needs in this direction — 
they must ask questions, and irrespective of any assurance 
that they can live by the truth they find: in short, they 
have the philosophical impulse. Now, whether for his weal or 
woe, Nietzsche belonged to the latter class — and the only wonder 
is how he could have the impulse, consistently with his theory 
of the origin and purpose of the intellect which has just been 
referred to. There is the same difficulty for us in studying Scho- 
penhauer, whose view here Nietzsche repeats (on which I have 
commented elsewhere). 18 In almost every direction we find him 
seeking the true, irrespective of any advantage to be gained, save 
the satisfaction of the knowing impulse itself. Particularly does 
he wrestle — twist and turn — in trying to make out the truth as 
to the external world. We find him, for instance, considering 

17 The view is more distinctly stated in the writings of the second 
period (cf. Human, Ail-too- Human, §40; The Wanderer and his Shadow, 
§ 12), but it was of earlier formation (cf. Werke, IX, 188, § 129). 

18 Article on " Schopenhauer's Contact with Pragmatism," in the 
Philosophical Review, March, 1910 (see pp. 140-4). 



56 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

the fact that a certain sensation or image always follows a certain 
stimulus, that this may hold of one generation after another, 
that it may be true of all mankind — it may seem conclusive proof 
that the image faithfully represents the object it stands for ; and 
yet he is forced to ask whether a metaphor ceases to be a metaphor 
because it is indefinitely repeated, and whether, for all that men 
agree so widely in using it, it is the only possible metaphor in 
the circumstances. He considers also the argument from the 
omnipresence and unvarying character of the laws of nature, 
namely, that since everything in the world, no matter how great 
or how small, is fixed, certain, law-abiding, fantasy can have 
nothing to do with it, since if it had, the marks of its arbitrary 
hand would be somewhere discernible. He admits the plausi- 
bility of the argument, and yet suppose, he says, that we could 
experience variously, each of us having our own type of sensa- 
tion, or suppose that we could perceive now as a bird does and 
now as a worm and now as a plant, or that where one responded 
to a stimulus with "red," another did with "blue" and still 
another with a sound, how then — where then would the uni- 
formity and law-abidingness of nature be? q Would there not 
be a variety of worlds — and where would be the world? Is it 
a wonder that beings of one physiological type have one type 
of world, and does the present uniform common world prove 
more than that we human beings are of one type? Does it in 
t}ie least prove that our responses to stimuli are the right re- 
sponses, i.e., rightly represent the object? Indeed, what is the 
meaning of "right" (richtig) in such a connection? — since we 
have no originals with which to compare them. In going from 
object to subject, we pass, for all we know, from one sphere of 
being to another, and there is as little propriety in speaking of 
a right sensation or image, as of a right sound for a color — we 
cannot go beyond symbols, metaphors under such conditions. 
All sensations and images, no matter how varying or even con- 
tradictory they might be, may be right for the type that makes 
them, i.e., may serve its special life-needs, and none be right 
in any final sense. Moreover, the fixity and order of things in 
our world are a fixity and order in space and time, and Nietzsche 
holds now (after Kant and Schopenhauer) that these are not 
independent realities, but forms of our own minds — no wonder 



ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 57 

then that things appear more or less definitely here and there, 
now and then; how otherwise could they appear at all? Un- 
questionably there is a spatial and temporal order, but we our- 
selves bring the ideas to things that make the order possible. 19 



The outcome of all this criticism is, so far as the question 
of ultimate truth goes, purely negative. At least, after becoming 
skeptical in regard to Schopenhauer's view that we have a real, 
first-hand knowledge of ourselves as will, Nietzsche is unable 
to advance any positive idea of reality at all. All that we are 
accustomed to call by this name is appearance, illusion. And 
yet a tentative speculation he does venture upon. It is a kind 
of panpsychism. We know indeed only our own sensations and 
thoughts and feelings — but what if the whole world is of this 
nature ? May not the things outside us [Nietzsche never doubts 
that there are such things — he is never solipsist or thoroughgoing 
idealist] be themselves in some sense "centers of sensation"? 
Even so they might affect one another (each being conceived 
as a spring of energy). They might get habits by acting and 
reacting (ultimately from motives of pleasure and pain). They 
might even be called will. Causality is perhaps an idea formed 
from the action of the will, particularly as it reacts to stimuli- 
Space and time in turn hang on causality. And so might arise 
in general the sort of world we know. 20 It is entirely a specu- 
lation — and confused and fragmentary at that; but perhaps it 
should be mentioned in qualification of the sweeping negative 
language which I have just used. In some ways it is similar to 
a view which we shall # find developed at length in the latter 
part of his life. 

18 This paragraph, too, bases itself on the fragment, "On Truth and 
Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense." 
20 Werke, X, 150-4. 



CHAPTER VI 

ETHICAL VIEWS 



Like Nietzsche 's first metaphysics, his first ethical views reveal 
the influence of Schopenhauer. In general, the order of the 
world, including that of human life, cannot be changed. It is 
not founded on reason, and is but slightly accessible to rational 
influence. The old rationalism effectually came to an end with 
Kant and Schopenhauer, who demonstrated the unsurpassable 
limits of theoretic curiosity, and begot anew the sense of the 
fundamental mysteriousness of things. A certain deep resig- 
nation is the practical consequence, a certain frank facing and 
acceptance of reality in all its forms, including those which 
are terrible. Instead of science, thinking that it can find the 
cause of all ills and so can remedy them, wisdom becomes the 
goal — wisdom, which refusing to be seduced by the specious 
promises of the sciences, looks unmoved on the world as a whole, 
and by sympathy and love seeks to make the eternal suffering 
it finds there its own. This is the atmosphere favorable to 
the rise of a new and tragic type of culture, similar to that 
which existed among the Greeks before Socrates and Euripides 
exercised their rationalizing influence. 1 

But because the broad features of the human lot cannot be 
changed, it does not follow that things may not be better than 
they are, that there is not something which man may strive 
for. At bottom Nietzsche was of idealistic temperament, and 
though this did not distort his vision of reality, it kept him 
from relapsing into quietism. He felt indeed that the weightiest 
question of philosophy was just how far the realm of the un- 
changeable extended, so that knowing this we might set out to 
improve the changeable side of things with all the courage at 
our command. 2 We may not be able to do much, and may 
easily be depressed, but neither becoming rich nor honored nor 

1 Birth of Tragedy, sect. 18; cf. sects. 14, 15, 17, 19. 
* " Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," sect. 3. 

58 



ETHICAL VIEWS 59 

learned will lift us out of our depression, and the only sense 
in striving in these directions is to win power, whereby we 
may come to the help of nature and correct a little her foolish 
and clumsy ways. 3 a 

What then can we do? What shall be our aim? Nietzsche's 
idealistic temper is plentifully in evidence in the way he gives 
his answer. We do not get our aim, he says, by studying his- 
tory, science, or circumstances now existing. In this way we 
acquaint ourselves with facts: but ethics is a question of our 
attitude to facts, of the way in which we shall confront them. 
/He does not like his historical generation, which wishes only 
to be "objective," which does not know how to love or hate, 
and perhaps, as in Hegel 's case, turns the historical process 
itself into a semi-divine affair. He thinks that Hegel's influence 
was so far harmful on German youth. One who bends and 
bows to the "power of history" gives in the end an obsequious 
"yes," Chinese fashion, to every "power," whether it be a 
government or a public opinion or a majority of heads, and 
moves to the time which the "power" sets. /Not so morality: 
it is not merely conceiver or interpreter, but judge — if history 
says what is or was, it says what should be or should have been. 
Raphael had to die at the age of thirty-six : was there anything 
right or rational in such a necessity? Some one was arguing 
in Germany at the time, that Goethe at eighty-two was worn 
out, but Nietzsche says that for a couple of years of the "worn- 
out" Goethe and of such conversations as he had with Ecker- 
mann, he would give whole wagon-loads of men still running 
their careers and highly modern at that. That the many go 
on living, while a few, such as these, come to an end, is nothing 
but brutal fact, stupidity that cannot be altered — a "so it is," 
over against the moral demand, "so it should not be." Yes, 
over against morality! he reiterates; for whatever the virtue 
we have in mind, whether it be justice, generosity, courage, 
wisdom, or pity, it is virtuous in so far as it rises against this 
blind might of facts, this tyranny of the actual, and subjects 
itself to laws which are not the laws of these historical fluctua- 
tions. 4 /He reflects in a similar spirit on statistics. " How, 

3 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 3. 

* " Use and Harm of History etc.," sect. 8. 



60 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

statistics prove that there are laws in history? Laws? Yes, 
they prove how common and pitifully -uniform the mass are: 
are we to call the operation of gravity, of stupidity, of blind 
imitation, of love, and of hunger, laws? Well, suppose we do; 
but if so, it also holds good that so far as there are laws in 
history, the laws are worth nothing and the history is worth 
nothing. ' ' y Effect, permanence, success are no real argument. 
Christianity became "an historical power,' ' but it was because 
earthly passions, errors, ambitions, survivals of the imperium 
Romanum, mingled with it, not because of its finer elements, 
and the purest and truest disciples it has had lived without 
appreciable results and remain for the most part unknown and 
unnamed. "Demosthenes had greatness, though he had no 
success.' ' To speak in Christian language, the Devil is the 
ruler of this world and the master of results here — he is the 
prime factor in all the so-called "historical powers," however 
unpleasantly the remark may strike the ear of those who deify 
success and baptize the Devil with a new name. 6 No, "let us 
not expect of the noblest things the toughness of leather." 
Indeed, not continuance at all, not life and victory, but tragic 
death may be the highest thing, as we feel on occasion in lis- 
tening to a Greek tragic drama. 7 

All this may be far from a complete statement of the relation 
of ethics to reality and the temporal order, but it touches cer- 
tain aspects of the subject, and brings home to us the impetuous 
earnestness of the young thinker. 



ii 

But if our aim is not given to us from without, it must be 
born from within. The fact is, we human beings judge what 
we see or learn — we face it with certain requirements. The 
gist of our requirements we call our ideal, and the ideal, so 
far as we make it an end to strive for, becomes our aim. Nietz- 
sche is conscious at the present time of no essential divergence 
from customary morality, and the ideal he has does not differ 
from that large vague ideal of good which most of us have, 
and which, when we hypostatize it, as we commonly do, and 

6 Ibid., sect. 9. ° Ibid., sect. 9. T Ibid., sect. 8. 



ETHICAL VIEWS 61 

strip it of limitations, is much the same as the Divine or God. 
It includes a justice, a love, a wisdom, a power, a beauty — in 
short, a total perfection — which are only suggested in anything 
we see or are. A distinction must be drawn between the ideal 
and the question of its actual embodiment anywhere (e.g., in 
a Divine Being or Beings) — also, between it and the question 
whether human life and conduct can actually be shaped in 
complete accordance with its demands. To both these questions 
Nietzsche felt obliged to reply negatively. We have already 
noted that he was atheist; and such in his eyes was the con- 
stitution of things that human life and action had to fall short 
of the ideal, and even to go counter to it to a certain extent. 
So little, however, does this mean that he failed to revere the 
ideal, that it was in its name that he, with Schopenhauer, pro- 
nounced the world undivine, and it was because of the sense 
of a contradiction between what ought to be and what is that 
pain and distress became so deep a part of his lot as a thinker. 
There only remained to make the ideal interpenetrate reality to 
the extent the conditions of existence would allow — and this 
was what his aim practically came to. It was as if he said, If 
God does not exist, let us see how near we can come to him. 
How truly this was the substance of his aim, and how strongly 
his feelings were enlisted, is manifest in an ejaculation which 
he imagines a disciple of culture making, and which, I take it, 
is a self-conf ession : "I see something higher and more human 
above me than I myself am; help me all to attain it, as I will 
help every one who feels and suffers as I do : in order that at 
last the man may arise who is full and measureless in knowl- 
edge and love and vision and power, and with his whole being 
cleaves to nature and takes his place in it as judge and valuer 
of things." 8 In another connection he says, "For what pur- 
pose the- world exists, why humanity exists, need not for the 
time concern us. . . . But why thou thyself art here, that 
thou mayest ask, and if no one else can tell it thee, seek to give 
a meaning to thy existence as it were a posteriori, by giving 
to thyself an aim, a goal, a wherefore, a high and noble where- 
fore. ' ' 9 To state the aim more concretely : since the character- 

8 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. 

8 " Use and Harm of History etc.," sect. 9. 



62 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

istic impulses of human nature are, as he held with Schopen- 
hauer, the theoretic, the creative or artistic, and the moral — im- 
pulses which yield, when they come to any sort of fruition, the 
philosopher, the artist, and the saint, — the aim is the production, 
in humanity of the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, and 
not merely as we sometimes find them, but in the fullness and 
perfection of their idea. We all have in us that which is 
kindred to these types, and this is why we long for them, and, 
as it were, see ourselves in them, when any approximation to 
them passes before our eyes. Yes, they are what nature in 
a blind way is groping after; they are the final goal of the 
creative process, the delivering, redeeming agencies not only 
for us, but for the World- Will itself — if we intelligently strive 
for them, we to this extent co-operate with nature and help to 
make up for her shortcomings and mistakes. 10 

Such is the perspective in which life is seen by Nietzsche. 
As most of us live it, it is not its own end;/men, as we 
ordinarily find them, have no great value on their own account. 
Striving simply for comfort, happiness, success is a sorry 
mistake. Our lives have significance only as they reach out 
after something beyond them. To speak of man's dignity 
per se, of his rights as man, is to deceive ourselves ; he acquires 
these only as he serves something higher than himself, as he 
helps in the production of the "genius" — this being a common 
term for the philosopher, the artist, and the saint. 11 Life as 
ordinarily lived is on little more than an animal level. Nietz- 
sche draws a striking picture of what our histories and 
sociologies reveal to us — the vast wanderings back and forth 
on the earth, the building of cities and states, the restless 
accumulating and spending, the competing with one another, 
the imitating of one another, the outwitting of one another 
and trampling on one another, the cries in straits, and the 
shouts of joy in victory: it is all to him a continuation of our 
animality, a senseless and oppressive thing. 12 And yet the 
whole picture changes when he thinks of men as animated by 
an aim like that which he projects. Then the most ordinary 
and imperfect would gain significance and worth. Though still 

""Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 5. " Werke, IX, 164. 

12 " Schopenhauer etc., sect. 5. 



ETHICAL VIEWS 63 

aware of their imperfection and owning that nature had suc- 
ceeded poorly in their own case, they would none the less 
remember the great end for which she was striving, and, placing 
themselves at her service, help her to succeed better in the 
future. 13 Nietzsche conceives that society might actually be 
pervaded by an aim of this character, that all might unitedly 
project it; indeed he recognizes that only in this way can the 
aim be accomplished — the task being too great for individuals/ 

in 

When society, or a given society, is inspired in this way, 
there will come what he calls a culture — this being a general - 
term for a unity of style in the activities, the life-expressions,, 
of a people. 14 Existing societies have no culture in this sense 
(though the French have had one) — the aims of men today 
are too haphazard, criss-cross ; particularly does Nietzsche make 
, light of the pretense of a German culture. 15 It is not outward 
/ forms, laws, or institutions that he has in mind, so much as a 
J spirit, a thought, a vital governing aim. At the same time the 
aim he proposes is not without definite characters. Not only 
is it contrasted with the aim of making everybody, or as many 
as possible, happy, but it is also contrasted with the ambition 
widely prevalent now of founding or furthering great com- 
munities (states or empires), which the individual is to find 
his supreme function in serving. /The community is not an 
end of itself. There is as much dignity in serving an individual, 
if he be one of the higher type, as in serving the state: it is 
not size, numbers, that determine value, but the quality and 
grade of being. 16 The end of social organization itself is to 
facilitate the emergence of the higher type or types of man. 
The ideal community is not one in which the members are on 
a par, all in turn ends and means, but one in which the higher 
types are ends and the rest are means to them. The old idea 
f service — one-sided service, if you will — is thus introduced. 
The philosopher, the artist, the saint being the culmination of 



A 



13 Ibid., sect. 6. 

14 " David Strauss etc.," sect. 7. 

l * Ibid., sect. 7, "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6, Werke (pocket ed.), 

II, XXX. 

10 "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. 



I 



64 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

existence, social arrangements and activity having normally the 
production or facilitation of them as their ultimate object, to 
whatever extent they appear at any given time, they are to be 
supremely considered, the rest of us finding our highest function 
jin serving them, rather than in serving ourselves or one another. 1 
t must be admitted that Nietzsche parts company thus at the 
start with the humanitarian, equalitarian, democratic ideals 
which rule among us today. Once he refers to the processes by 
which (according to the Darwinian view) progress, the evolu- 
tion of higher species, has taken place in the animal and plant 
world. The matter of critical moment, the starting-point for 
a further development in a given species, has been some unusual 
specimen — some variation from the average type, to use Dar- 
win's term — which now and then under favorable conditions 
arose. Not the average members of the species and their wel- 
fare, not those either which came last in point of time and their 
welfare, were of maximum importance or the goal of the species' 
development, but just these scattering and apparently acci- 
dental specimens and their welfare, by means of which the 
transition to a new species became possible, j In the lower realms 
the progress was unintended and unconscious, but the method 
by which it was secured may be pursued in higher realms, and 
just because we human beings are conscious and may have a 
conscious aim, we may search out and establish the conditions 
favorable to the rise of our higher specimens and not 
leave them to come by chance, and so develope along the hu- 
man line of progress in an unprecedented manner./ Schopen- 
hauer had said, ' ' Humanity should labor continually to produce 
individual great men — and this and nothing else is its task," 
and Nietzsche now repeats it after him. Still more definitely, 
"How does thy individual life receive its highest value, its 
deepest significance? Surely only in that thou livest to the 
advantage of the rarest and most valuable specimens of thy 
kind, not to that of the most numerous, i.e., taken singly, least 
valuable specimens. ' ' 17 / 

The classifying of men as ends and means is not, however, 
a part of Nietzsche's ideal itself, but a result of the way in 
which men actually present themselves in the world. Some 

"Ibid., sect. 6. 



ETHICAL VIEWS 65 

are or tend to become higher individuals, others do not — 
though it would seem as if all might. Nietzsche himself is 
involved in more or less contradiction in dealing with the 
matter. Now he speaks of every one as having the higher possi- 
bilities, as being essentially individual and unique, 18 now he 
says that the mass are always "common and pitifully uniform" 
and that the "modern man" in particular "suffers from a weak 
personality ' ' 19 — one thinks of Emerson 's plaint with regard to 
the clergy that they were ' ' as alike as peas, ' ' he could not ' ' tell 
them apart." 20 Perhaps Nietzsche could only have reconciled 
these discordant utterances by saying that when an aim takes 
practical shape, it has to adapt itself to matter-of-fact condi- 
tions, and make the best of material that is at hand. Sometimes 
he states his aim as consisting in the furthering of the produc- 
tion of the philosopher, the artist and the saint, "within us and 
without us," 21 and doubtless he would fain have seen every 
man a higher man, and none used for ends outside them ; n but, 
as things are, only a few show effectively the higher possibili- 
ties, and the rest come nearest to a high value by serving them. 
I shall recur to the subject in treating his closing period. 23 

Nietzsche gathered encouragement for his hope of a new 
culture from the old Greek world. The contemplation of that 
great past made him believe that what he wished for was no 
empty dream. 24 He says, "The Greeks are interesting and tre- 
mendously important (ganz toll wichtig), because they had such 
a number of great individuals. How was this possible? It is 
this that we must study." "What alone interests me is the 
relation of a people to the education of the individual." And 
yet it must be confessed that in the fragmentary notes 25 from 
which these remarks are taken, Nietzsche gives us scant light 

18 Ibid., sects. 1, 5. 

19 "Use and Harm of History etc.," sects. 5, 9. Cf. Havelock Ellis's 
observations on this point, Affirmations, p. 21. 

20 "The Preacher," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches. 

21 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 5 (the italics are mine). 

22 Cf. the strong feeling he shows about using up individuals for 
scientific purposes, by narrowly specializing them ; " the furthering of a 
science at the expense of men is the most injurious thing in the world " 
(Werke, X, 413, §§ 274-5; cf. IX, 325). 

23 See pp. 381-2. 

24 Cf. the remarks of his sister, Werke (pocket ed.), II, xxi. 

25 They were intended for use in " We Philologists." 



66 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

on the subject. He does little more than point out that the 
" great individuals ' ' did not come from any particular friendli- 
ness on the part of the people, arising rather amid conflicts in 
which evil impulses had their part, and states a general con- 
viction that when man's inventive spirit gets to work, there 
may be other and better results than those which have hitherto 
come from chance. It is the training (Zuchtung) of the higher 
types, i.e., a conscious purpose in that direction, on which the 
hope of the future rests. 26 

rv 

His derivation of special duties presents little that is unusual. 
"Duties" are born of ideals. Ultimately we impose them on 
ourselves; yet they may be strict obligations. 27 He speaks of 
the "pressure" of the chain of duties which the Schopenhauer 
type of man fastens on himself. 28 "Favored" is synonymous 
to him with "fearfully obligated." Freedom is a privilege, 
an obligation, a heavy one, "and it can only be paid off by 
great deeds"; those who fail to realize this, do nothing good 
with their freedom and easily go to pieces. 29 He even speaks 
of those who enter the lists for a culture such as has been 
described, as coming to "the feeling of a duty to live" 30 — a 
different thing, I need not say, from the animal craving to live. 

"Justice," "sympathy," "pity," "love" sometimes receive 
shades of meaning which are determined by his particular 
views, but substantially they mean the same to him as to the 
rest of us. He is not laudatory of power, and asks his genera- 
tion, "Where are those among you who will follow the divine 
example of Wotan and become greater the more they withdraw 
— who will renounce power, knowing and feeling that it is 
evil?" 31 He speaks of Wagner as early tempted to seek for 
"power and glory," but notes that he had risen to purer air. 32 
The man inspired by justice he deems the most reverend speci- 
men of our kind, and he finds it an impulse for the scholar as 

" See WerJce, X, 384-5, §§ 199, 200. 

27 " Schopenhauer etc.," sects. 5, 6, 8. 

28 Ibid., sect. 5. 
28 Ibid., sect. 8. 

80 Ibid., sect. 6. 

81 "Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 11. 

82 Ibid., sect. 8. 



ETHICAL VIEWS 67 

truly as for others; a spark from this fire falling into the 
scholar's soul purifies and ennobles him — lifts him out of the 
lukewarm or frigid mood in which he is apt to do his daily 
task. 33 Nietzsche interprets justice (momentarily at least) 
after Schopenhauer, as a metaphysical impulse 34 — that is, one 
that breaks down the wall of individuality belonging to our 
phenomenal being and makes each say "I am thou." Egoism, 
in the ordinary sense of the term, receives little countenance 
from him; whether unintelligent or intelligent, whether on the 
part of the people or of the possessing classes, it wins no 
admiration. 35 

Sympathy and pity rank with justice. I may cite here an 
incident in his personal history. His attack on Strauss has 
been already mentioned. It sounds malicious at times, cer- 
tainly it was often ironical, but it was really an attack on the 
specious German culture which Strauss represented (particu- 
larly in the widely read Old and New Faith™), not on Strauss 
himself; and when the learned man died, Nietzsche was half- 
rueful (for his book had made considerable impression), and 
wrote a friend, ' ' I hope that I did not make his last years harder 
to bear, and that he died without knowing anything of me. 
It disturbs me a bit." 37 His sister tells us that so long as a 
type he combated was impersonal, he could fight joyfully; but 
when he was suddenly made to realize that a man of sensitive 
heart, surrounded by revering friends, stood behind it, pity 
arose instead, and he suffered more from the blows of his sword 
than the enemy did — and that then he would sigh, "I am not 
really made for hating and enmity. ' ' M b He had also sympathy 
for the "people," the unfortunate. In discussing the reform 
of the theater, he appears to have above all the popular aspects 
of the case in mind, speaking of the hollowness and thought- 
lessness of a society, which only concerns itself for the mass so 

83 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. 

34 Ibid., sect. 6. 

35 " Use and Harm of History etc.," sects. 5, 9; cf. the tone in which 
" truth as an egoistic possession of the individual " is spoken of, sect. 6. 

36 Welcker judged Strauss with similar sharpness (according to R. M. 
Meyer, Jahrbuch fur das classische Alterthum, V (1900), 716. 

37 See Werke (pocket ed.), II, xxxviii. There is a later reference in 
somewhat different tone, Werke (8vo ed.), XIV, 373-4, §250. 

38 Werke (pocket ed.), II, xl. 



68 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

far as they are useful or dangerous, and goes to the theater 
and concerts without ever a thought of duties. 39 He even says, 
"One cannot be happy, so long as everything suffers and 
creates suffering about us ; one cannot be moral, so long as the 
course of human things is determined by violence, deceit, and 
injustice ; one cannot even be wise, so long as all mankind has 
not striven for wisdom and does not lead the individual in the 
wisest way to life and knowledge " 40 — it is almost a socialistic 
sentiment. He tells us how Wagner "out of pity for the 
people" became a revolutionist 41 (something many of us may 
not know, unless perchance we have read Mr. Shaw's The Per- 
fect Wagnerite) , and gives an admiring description of Wagner's 
art, which no longer uses the language of a caste, knows no 
distinction between the educated and the uneducated, and is 
contrasted to this extent with the culture of the Renaissance, 
including that of Leopardi and of Goethe, its last great fol- 
lowers. 42 Indeed under Wagner's spell, he hails a future in 
which there will be no highest goods and enjoyments which are 
not common to all. 43 He desires an art — a true art, a true 
music — which shall be just for those who least deserve it, but 
most need it. 44 We have already noted his glowing picture of 
the effect of the ancient Dionysian festivals and dramas in 
uniting different classes, breaking down the barriers between 
free men and slaves, making men feel, indeed, their oneness 
with all that lives — no one without deep human sympathies 
could have written in this way; and it was a new Dionysiac 
art, a new Dionysiac age, for which he at this time thought 
that Wagner was helping to prepare the way. 

Sympathy and pity are only forms which love takes in 
given situations, and love as a principle, as the culmination of 
justice, and reaching its perfect expression in the saint, is the 
supreme thing to Nietzsche. The distinctive noble marks of 
youth are "fire, defiance, self-forgetfulness, and love." 45 
Light-bearers seek out men, reluctant to lend their ears, "com- 

89 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4. 

40 Ibid., sect. 5. 

41 Ibid., sect. 8; cf. Ecce Homo, II, 5. 

42 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 10. 
48 Ibid., sect. 10. 

44 Ibid., sect. 6. 

46 " Use and Harm of History etc.," sect. 9. 



ETHICAL VIEWS 69 

pelled by love." 46 "The Ring of the Nibelungen" is "the 
most moral music" that he knows — he refers above all to the 
transfiguration of love there portrayed, clouds, storms, and even 
the sublime in nature being beneath it. 47 He compares Wagner 
(whose cause he is pleading in the uncertain days before 
Bayreuth) to Sieglinde who lives "for love's sake." 48 It is 
love which purifies us after despair, love by which we make the 
eternal suffering of the world our own, love in which the artist 
and we all create, or do anything that is truly great; through 
love alone we learn not only to see truly and scorn ourselves, 
but to look out beyond ourselves and seek with all our power for 
a higher self which is still somewhere hidden. 49 

Morality reaches its culmination in the saint. Nietzsche 
praises Schopenhauer for making the saint the final judge of 
existence. 50 The thought is the same when he describes in turn 
the Rousseau ideal of man, the Goethe ideal, and the Schopen- 
hauer ideal, and calls the last superior. The Schopenhauer 
type negates whatever can be negated to the end of reaching 
the truly real. He may in the process put an end to his earthly 
happiness, may have to be hostile even to men he loves and to 
institutions that gave him birth, he dare spare neither men nor 
things, although he suffers from the injury he inflicts; he may 
be misunderstood and long pass as an ally of powers he despises, 
may have to be counted unjust, though all his striving is for 
justice — but he will say to himself, and find consolation in 
saying (they are Schopenhauer's words), "A happy life is 
impossible ; the highest thing which man can reach, is an heroic 
course of life. Such he leads who, in any manner and situation, 
fights against enormous odds for what is in some way of uni- 
versal benefit and in the end conquers, though he is ill or not 
at all rewarded. ' ' 51 This may not be the ordinary idea of the 
saint, but it is what Nietzsche means when he uses the term: 
it is really the hero-saint whom he has in mind. Such an one 

48 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 6. 
47 Ibid., sect. 2. 

49 Ibid., sect. 10. 

49 Ibid., sect. 8, Birth of Tragedy, sect. 18, " Schopenhauer etc.," 
sect. 6. 

60 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 7. 

61 Ibid., sect. 4. Cf. Schopenhauer's Parerga und Parelipomena, II, 
§ 172; Aphorismen fur Lebensweisheit, § 53. 



70 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

dies to self, he scarcely lives any longer as a separate person, 
his suffering is but part of the universal suffering — Nietzsche 
remarks that there are moments in our experience when we 
hardly understand the word ' * I. ' ' 52 It is a part of the higher 
purpose of tragedy to awaken this sense of a superpersonal 
being. It is a sense which the contemplation of death and 
change (things inwrought with individual existence) does not 
disturb; and Nietzsche is bold enough to imagine that as an 
individual touched by the tragic spirit unlearns the fearful 
anxiety about death and change which besets most of us, so 
the ideal height for mankind, when it comes to die, as die it 
must, will be to have so grown together into unity that it can 
as a whole face its dissolution with equal elevation and com- 
posure. 53 It is a thought hard to grasp. 

I have said that to Nietzsche the ideal was born from within, 
a free projection of the soul. So vital is this element of freedom 
to him that he at one time makes a remark which may offend us. 
It is in connection with an interpretation of Wagner and is 
really a statement of Wagner's view, but from the way he 
makes it, we may be sure that it represents his own. After 
saying that it is no final arrangements for the future, no Utopia, 
which Wagner contemplates, that even the superhuman good- 
ness and justice which are to operate there will be after no 
unchangeable pattern, and that possibly the future race will in 
some ways seem more evil than the present one, he adds (in 
substance) : for whatever else the life may be, it will be open 
and free, passion will be counted better than stoicism [stoic 
apathy] and hypocrisy, honor even in evil courses better than 
losing oneself in the morality of tradition — for, though the free 
man may be good as well as evil, the unfree man is a dishonor 
to nature and without part either in heavenly or in earthly 
consolation, and whoever will be free must make himself so, 
freedom falling into no man's lap as a gift. 54 He may also 
offend us in what he says of Siegfried, for he speaks admiringly 
of the Selbstigkeit of this hero. Now Siegfried is, as Mr. 
Shaw has pointed out, something of a revolutionist; he disre- 

52 "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 5. 
08 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4. 
"Ibid., sect. 11. 



ETHICAL VIEWS 71 

gards traditional laws and the ancient Gods — he is for man, 
for the living. In all this he is free, fearless, follows his im- 
pulse absolutely — and Nietzsche calls it his "Selbstigkeit," 
"unschuldige Selbstigkeit." 55 The word is an unusual one 
and English writers ordinarily render it "selfishness" — so that 
Nietzsche appears to sanction selfishness and pronounce it 
innocent from the start. The Germans have, however, a special 
word for selfishness, which it is noticeable that Nietzsche does 
not use, Selbstsucht, and the connection plainly shows that it 
is simply an unconditional following of inner impulse against 
outward pressure, a strong selfhood, which he has in mind: we 
might say ' ' self -will, ' ' if we could rid that word of associations 
of petty arbitrariness and obstinacy. An analogue to Siegfried 
may be found in Prometheus, to whom Nietzsche elsewhere 
refers — and with something of the same thought. The glory 
of Prometheus in his eyes is that he is ready to save the needy 
race of man even though he goes against the laws and pre- 
rogatives of the Gods, i.e., by sin — the Aryan myth thus pre- 
senting an interesting contrast to the corresponding Semitic one, 
according to which mere feminine curiosity and weakness 
brought down Heaven's wrath. 56 

But the strong selfhood, which is an indispensable part of 
Nietzsche's conception of virtue, involves hardness on occasion 
— one must not be too sensitive to pain, whether one's own or 
others'. /The thinker must be ready to be hardy A part of 
Nietzsche's admiration for Schopenhauer lay in the fact that 
he was a good and brave fighter ; he had had by inheritance and 
also from his father's example that first essential of the philoso- 
pher, firm and rugged masculinity (unbeugsame und rauhe 
Mdnnlichkeit) 5 Nietzsche also appreciates unconventionality — 
and this too because a strong selfhood is thereby indicated. 
Our artists, he says, and notably Wagner, live more bravely and 
honorably than our scholars and professors — even Kant con- 
formed too much. 58 / 

55 Ibid., sect. 11. 

66 Birth of Tragedy, sect. 9. 

67 " Schopenhauer etc.," sects. 2, 3, 7. 
"Ibid., sects. 3, 7, 8. 



CHAPTER VII 

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS 

Nietzsche's moral aim became practically, as we have seen, a 
striving for a new culture) Some consequences in the social 
and political field are now to be noted. 



One is the sanction he feels obliged to give to slavery. 
Wherever there has been anything like culture or civilization 
in the world, something like slavery has been at its basis. It 
is so now. The current phrase ' 'factory slave" is not a mere 
metaphor. When an individual works for others' good rather 
than his own, and has to, whether the compelling force is that 
of a personal master or of circumstances over which he has no 
control, slavery exists in principle. 1 It is not a thing in which, 
as one might imagine from current representations of Nietzsche, 
he takes pleasure, but rather one of those forbidding facts which 
give a problematical character to existence in general. The only 
apology for slavery is that the possibility of attaining the 
higher ends of human existence is bound up with it. Culture — 
meaning now broadly any social state in which man rises above 
his natural life as an animal and pursues ends like philosophy 
and art — does not come at will, but is strictly conditioned. As 
before stated, it is the fruit of leisure ; and that there may be 
leisure for some, others must work more than their share. a 
Such a necessity goes against our instincts of humanity and 
justice, and many have been led to rebel against it. We read 
of Emerson making a modest attempt in this direction. It was 
in the days of the Anti-Slavery agitation and he had been 
urging, with a somewhat larger view than the abolitionists ordi- 
narily took, ' ' Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works 
all day steadily in his own garden, than he who goes to the 

(Nietzsche's broad use of the term "slave" becomes even more con- 
spicuous later, see pp. 127, 249-50, 442-3. 

72 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS 73 

abolition meeting and makes a speech? He who does his own 
work frees a slave.' ' And now, as if at least to set his own life 
right, he goes to work digging in his Concord garden — if not all 
day, a part of it. He continues for a time, but he finds alasl 
that his writing and power of intellectual work are suffering, 
that, as he quaintly puts it, if his ' ' terrestrial corn, beets, onions, 
and tomatoes flourish, the celestial archetypes do not" — and 
so comes at last to the reluctant conclusion, " The writer 
shall not dig." b The logic of the experience is old. Of course, 
when he ceased doing "his own work," some one else had to 
work the more (supposing that his writing and thinking were 
to continue), and "slavery" went on much as before. Nietzsche 
puts it broadly, "Slavery belongs to the nature of a culture" 
(zum Wesen einer Cultur gehort das Sklaventhum) . "That 
there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for a development 
of art, the immense majority must be in service to a minority"; 
at the former's expense, by their surplus labor (Nietzsche does 
not shun the Marxian word, Mehrarbeit)ifa privileged few 
are lifted above the struggle for existence. 2 It is a hard view, 
but the truth, he thinks, is hard at times, 3 and it seems a virtue 
to him not to deceive oneself. We in our day speak of the 
"dignity of man," the "dignity of labor," the "equal rights" 
of all — to him these are phantom conceptions by which we 
hide the real state of the case from our eyes, above all by which 
the great slave mass among us hide their real estate from their 
eyes. 4 y 

ii 

But Nietzsche must not be misunderstood. In recognizing 
the slavery of the manual workers, he does not mean to place 
them in contrast with the employing and commercial classes 
who have rights to do as they please. One of the best and 
most intelligent of our American newspapers speaks of him 
as "par excellence the philosopher of the unscrupulous business 
man. ' ' 5 This is the half -knowledge, or rather, to speak frankly, 

2 WerJce, IX, 151. Nietzsche is here stating the presuppositions of 
Greek culture, but the truth is to his mind general. 
8 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 4. 
4 Werke, IX, 148-9. 
6 Springfield Weekly Republican, 14 Nov., 1907. 



74 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

the ignorance of our cultivated circles with respect to Nietzsche 
today. In a normal social organization, the employing and 
commercial classes would in his view be subject to control as 
well as the workers. The unhappy thing in the modern world 
is that they have more or less emancipated themselves from 
control. This is the meaning of laisser faire — a doctrine of 
liberty in the interests of the employing and commercial classes. 
Nietzsche finds it working injuriously on the morality of modern 
peoples. 6 The unrestrained egoism of individuals as of peoples 
is pushing them into mutually destructive struggles, and it is 
the most covetous who have the supreme place. 7 Once a re- 
straining influence was exercised by the Church, but the 
Reformation was obliged, in order to get a foothold, to declare 
many things adiaphora (i.e., not subject to the control 
of religious considerations), and economical activity was one of 
them, with the result that "the coarsest and most evil forces " 
have come to be the practically determining things almost 
everywhere. 8 Educated classes and states alike are carried 
away by pecuniary ambitions, at once grandiose and contempti- 
ble. He speaks repeatedly of "the selfishness of the business 
class/' "the brutal money-greed of the entrepreneurs."* It 
is "a period of atoms, of atomistic chaos/ ' into which we have 
passed. 10 

Particularly after the Franco-Prussian war did Nietzsche 
notice the unchaining of this vulgar egoism in Germany. 
Rapacious striving, insatiable accumulating, selfish and shame- 
less enjoying were characteristic marks of the time. 11 "When 
the war was over, the luxury, the contempt of the French, the 
nationalism (das Nationale) displeased me. How far back had 
we gone compared with Goethe! Disgusting sensualism! ' ,12 
The new spirit perverted the aims of culture. Now forsooth 
education was to be for practical purposes ; the kind that looked 
beyond money and gain, that consumed much time and sep- 
arated one from society, was questioned — or stigmatized as 

6 ' ' Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 2. 

7 Birth of Tragedy, sect. 15, " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 6. 

8 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect 4. 

8 Ibid., sect. 6, " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4. 

10 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 4. 

11 Ibid., sect. 6. 

12 Werke x XI, 119, § 369. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS 75 

"refined egoism," " Epicureanism. ' ' People said, "We have 
been too poor and modest hitherto, let us become rich and self- 
conscious, and then we also [i.e., as well as the French] shall 
have a culture!" — to which Nietzsche could only reply that 
this kind of a culture would be the opposite of what he believed 
in. 13 Art was misconceived, though this tendency he admitted 
to be general in modern society: "modern art is luxury," the 
appanage of the wealthy class, their relief from fatigue or 
ennui. He comments on the unscrupulousness of those who 
take art and artists into their pay; for just as they "by the 
shrewdest and most hard-hearted use of their power have 
known how to make the weaker, the people, even more sub- 
servient, lower, less like the people of old (unvolksthumlicher) , 
and to create the modern type of "worker," so they have laid 
hands on the greatest and purest things which the people have 
created out of their deepest need and in which they have ten- 
derly expressed their soul in true and unique artist fashion, 
namely, their myths, their songs, their dances, their idioms of 
speech, in order to distil out of it all a sensuous remedy for 
the exhaustion and tedium of their existence." 14 Indeed few 
socialists, and, I might add, few old-time aristocrats, could 
speak more disrespectfully than he of the industrial and com- 
mercial powers that now rule the world — the money powers 
included, who use the state itself for selfish purposes, and on 
occasion oppose war and even favor the masses against mon- 
archs, since the masses incline to peace, and peace is better for 
them to ply their trade in ! 15 | This does not mean that he fails 
to recognize the legitimate place of industry and trade and 
finance in the world, however large the scale on which they 
may be conducted ; he has no notion of returning to an archaic 
simplicity of life after the manner of Tolstoy. "Every society 
must have its bowels," he remarks in homely fashion; 16 and 
he would doubtless have agreed that the larger the society, the 
wider its range of need, the ampler the bowels might well be. 
The inversion of the true order of things which he finds today 

18 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. 

14 "Richard Wagner etc./' sect. 8. 

15 Werke, IX, 160-2. As against this kind of supremacy, Nietzsche is 
willing to have war. 

19 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 6. 



76 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

is simply that the bowels have become the end for which the 
body exists. Servants in control, instead of being controlled — 
this is the gist of the situation, the business as truly as the 
working classes coming normally under the serving or slave 
category. Freemen are a different class altogether — they are 
the higher types already described, whose manner of life the 
slaves make possible, those for whom the ordered life of society 
ultimately exists and from whom it normally receives its final 
direction. 

in 

In the light of the foregoing, the personal " non-political' ' 
attitude of Nietzsche is not so strange. It has little to do with 
theoretic anarchism. He recognizes the place and function of 
the state. While originating in force, violence, usurpation, and 
so of shameful birth, the result of it in time is an ordered social 
life on a large scale (for families or tribes or village communi- 
ties are hardly as yet states), and the possibility of a class set 
free from labor, who can devote themselves to the higher ends 
of life. This is its justification — the justification even of the 
conquest and wrong that lie at its basis. "Proudly and calmly 
the Greek state advances before the judgment seat, and leads 
by the hand a blooming and glorious figure, Greek society. For 
this Helen it makes its wars — what gray-bearded judge will 
dare pass an adverse verdict ? " 17 Hence if Nietzsche does not 
take part in the political life of his time and even intentionally 
holds aloof from it, it was not for anarchistic reasons. In the 
first place it should be borne in mind that for all his criticism 
he was essentially loyal to his fatherland — even to Prussia. 
He admitted that one who is possessed by the furor philo- 
sophicus has no time for the furor politicus, but he added that 
if one's country is in actual need, one will not hesitate for a 
moment to take one's post; 18 and he had himself, as we have 
seen, taken service under Prussia, so far as he could, in the 
war of 1870. Secondly, he held that the political art is essen- 
tially a special art, i.e., one not for everybody, but for those 
who are specially trained. All are properly subject to the 
state, but not all should have a hand in steering it. He thought 

17 Werke, IX, 159. 18 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 7. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS 77 

\ 

that states are poorly arranged, in which other than statesmen 
have to interfere in public business, and that they merit their 
fate if they go to pieces from "these many statesmen.'' 19 And, 
thirdly, he felt that politics is actually in a bad way at the 
present time — commercial aims are ruling it and socialism is 
threatening; wealth, comfort, "freedom" are the main things 
aimed at — it is a practically uncontrollable tendency that must 
have its day. He saw the new tendency, as just explained, 
taking possession of Germany. Hence he was not at home in 
the world about him. The Socrates of Plato compared the wise 
man under the political conditions of the then-existing world 
to one who takes shelter behind a wall, when the wind is making 
a hurricane of dust and rain. 20 Something like this was Nietz- 
sche's attitude to the politics of his day. He felt that a valid 
order did not exist — that a kind of madness was taking pos- 
session of men's minds. Or, if I am not again connecting him 
with too great a name, he was like Plato himself when the latter 
turned the energy of his thought and imagination to the con- 
struction of an ideal res publica — and indeed Nietzsche's con- 
ception in detail was not unlike Plato's, save as he gave (par- 
ticularly at this time) a vital place to the artist, a class whom 
Plato wished to banish. Nietzsche himself notes that the fire 
and exaltation of Plato's political passion went in this ideal 
(rather than practical) direction. 21 He comments on Niebuhr's 
reproach against Plato that he was a poor citizen, and says, Let 
one who feels in this way be a good citizen, and let Plato be 
what he was. 22 In other words, political activity has a quite 
secondary place in his estimation — though this does not mean 
that he gave it no place. A state-favored philosophy he counted 
especially undesirable, states being what they are. The state 
wants only what is useful to itself. Better let philosophers 
grow wild or even be persecuted, he once ventures to say, and 
then perhaps the real ones will be sifted out. 23 A happy con- 
trast, in his judgment, of the Greek state with the prevailing 
type of state today is, that it did not assume to be a regulator 
or overseer of culture, but simply a good muscular helper, a 
hardy escort for it among rough realities. 24 

19 Ibid., sect. 7. 22 " Schopenhauer etc.,'' sect. 8. 

20 The Republic, vi, 496. 28 Ibid., sect. 8. 

21 Werke, IX, 164. 24 Werke, IX, 369, 370. 



CHAPTER VIII 

RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 

The intellectual preparation for the new culture which Nietz- 
sche hoped for had been made, he thought, by Kant and Scho- 
penhauer — the former in demonstrating the limits of scientific 
knowledge, the latter in facing fearlessly the tragic facts of 
existence and in proposing the production of the philosopher, 
the artist, and the saint, as the true aim of human life. But 
the practical attaining of the result was another matter — and 
art, he believed, might render great assistance to this end. Yes, 
a certain kind of art would stand almost in a relation of cause 
and effect to it — namely, art of the Dionysiac type such as had 
existed among the Greeks. Nietzsche thought he discovered the 
beginnings of such an art in the work of a contemporary — 
Richard Wagner. Wagner was, in a sense, a disciple of Scho- 
penhauer; he possessed an ardent moral nature and was dis- 
satisfied with the existing forms of social and political life; he 
too looked, however vaguely, for a new culture, and was not 
without the thought that art — and his art in particular — might 
serve to this end. 



It is necessary to explain at the outset Nietzsche's view of 
the peculiar nature of musical art — something I passed over in 
treating his view of art in general. In it he follows closely 
in the footsteps of Schopenhauer. Music is radically different 
from the other arts. A picture, a statue, or a poem of the epic 
order portrays things without us, or as we might imagine their 
existing without us — it gives us objects. Music, on the other 
hand, expresses feeling and has nothing to do directly with 
objects. It reflects moods, desires, longings, resolves — the whole 
spontaneous and voluntary side of our nature, which Schopen- 
hauer summed up as will. No doubt most of us are conscious 

78 



RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 79 

at times of a peculiar intimacy in music — it touches us, takes 
hold of us, seems to reveal hidden depths within us, as nothing 
else does. Schopenhauer called it the most metaphysical of 
the arts, meaning that it comes nearest to expressing the inmost 
reality of things, which to his mind was will. The other arts 
are at two removes from this reality; not only is it objects 
which they give us, but these objects are themselves repre- 
sentative of objects. Music, on the contrary, stands directly 
related to it — when we listen to music, only this lightest, most 
insubstantial, most transparent of all objects, sound, stands 
between us and the reality. 

Now there are feelings of the moment, and there is what 
we may call the ground-tone of our life — our feeling about life, 
our attitude to it, whether of affirmation or negation, in short, 
the set of our will as a whole. It is music of the deeper, more 
significant sort that interested Nietzsche, and it was this kind 
of music which he thought lay at the basis of the Greek tragic 
drama. It was of religious inspiration, reflected general moods 
about life, was a part of the worship of Dionysus./' The full 
title of Nietzsche's book on Greek Tragedy was The Birth of 
Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. In it he points out that 
the earliest form of tragedy was simply song and gesture 
(dance), that the dialogue came later and was a secondary 
matter. Even down to Sophocles the chorus was the central 
thing. Hence in that revival of a tragic culture, toward which 
Nietzsche's thoughts were turning, it was natural that music 
should have a central place, — it was natural too to think that 
music would render vital service in preparing the way for that 
culture, by stirring the feelings, the mood, on which it would 
ultimately rest.* ) 

ii 

The capital point in this theory is that the musical strains 
are expressive of feeling directly, neither copying external 
objects nor produced for objective effect — the purity of music 
lies in its lyric quality. Just in proportion to its genuineness 
would, Nietzsche held, the new music avail. 1 The Dionysian 
maenads had no thought whether others were observing them 
1 Cf. Birth of Tragedy, sects. 19, 22, 24. 



80 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

or not — they sang and danced from inner impulse; Raphael's 
Cecilia, we feel, is not singing to others, but to herself and 
heaven. 2 True music is a kind of soliloquy, and Wagner reaches 
this, Nietzsche feels, in his great works, " Tristan and Isolde," 
the " Meistersinger, ' ' and the "Ring." 3 Wagner too has the 
right view of the relation of words to music (i.e., Nietzsche 
thinks so at the start) : the music, through which the ground- 
emotion of the persons in the drama is communicated to the 
hearer, is for him the primary thing; then comes the action or 
gestures of the persons, and last of all the words, as a still 
paler reflection of the original emotional state. 4 The music is 
not an accompaniment to the words (as is the case in ordinary 
opera — something which Nietzsche detests), rather are the 
words a kind of halting accompaniment to the music. b Yes, in 
such words as Wagner knows how to use, he gets back, Nietzsche 
feels, to the primitive significance of language — which was 
itself half poetry and feeling; the words are often tones more 
than anything else — and to Wagner's sympathetic imagination, 
all nature, alive and striving, seeks to express itself in tones. 
In this connection Nietzsche refers to Schiller's confession that 
in poetical composition his mind had no definite and clear 
object before it at the start, the first impulse being a certain 
musical mood, and that the poetical idea came afterwards and 
as a consequence. 5 Nietzsche interprets the folk-song in a 
similar way — the air or melody is primary, and the accom- 
panying poetry is born out of it, and may even be of different 
sorts: the music is the standard, with which the words strive 
to harmonize. 6 He goes so far as to say of music in general, 
that it tolerates the image, word, or concept rather than needs 
it, language never touching its inner depths. 70 Feeling is 
equally, he holds, the original element in myths such as Wagner 
uses or fashions — in them he poetizes. In the "Ring," for 
instance, we have a series of myths, which Wagner partly 
adopted, partly created, as an objectivation of his feeling about 
the world and society — they are utterly unintelligible as scien- 
tific statements, and can only be comprehended as we pass into 

1 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 9. B Birth of Tragedy, sect. 5. 

8 IUd., sect. 8. ° Ibid., sect. 6. 

4 Ibid., sect. 5. 7 Ibid., sect. 6. 



RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 81 

the mood out of which they were projected; a corresponding 
scientific statement might be made, but it would be totally 
different. 8 

in 
With these deeper views of music, with his poetic, myth- 
making gift (a far greater, more helpful thing to the mass of 
mankind than the analytic scientific faculty), with his broad 
human sympathies and his sense of the tragic nature of the 
world, Wagner was the man, Nietzsche thought, to prepare the 
general mind emotionally, as Kant and Schopenhauer had intel- 
lectually, for the culture to be; if Schopenhauer was par emi- 
nence its philosopher, Wagner was to be its artist. Broad im- 
personal ties of this kind lay at the basis of the enthusiastic 
attachment which he formed for Wagner — the great musician 
met a profound need of the time, filled out his ideal. But per- 
sonal relations were also formed — and the friendship between 
the two men, while it lasted, was something rare and beautiful. 
As before stated, he often spent week-ends with Wagner in his 
villa at the foot of Mt. Pilatus, overlooking Lake Lucerne — 
with Wagner and his wife Cosima, for whom he had an almost 
equally reverent affection. At this time the master was working 
on ' ' Siegfried, ' ' and plans were also making for the event which 
loomed so large in their common expectations — Bayreuth. 
Nietzsche afterwards said that he was perhaps the first to love 
Wagner and Schopenhauer with a single enthusiasm 9 — and in 
writing to a friend at the time he described these days (between 
1869-72) as his " practical course in the Schopenhauerian 
philosophy. ' ' 10 He felt that he was in the presence of a genius 
such as Schopenhauer had portrayed. "No one knows him, ,, 
he writes, "or can judge of him, because all the world stands 
on a different basis and is not at home in his atmosphere. 
There is such an absolute ideality about him, such a deep and 
affecting humanity, such sublime seriousness that I feel in his 
presence as if I were near something divine. ' ' n Again, ' 1 1 

8 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 9. 

9 Werke, XIV, 375, § 254. 

10 Brief e, II, 150. See the description of this intercourse, and the 
admirable account of the whole Metzsche-Wagner episode by Richter, 
Friedrich Nietzsche u.s.w., pp. 37-56. 

11 Brief e, I, 142-3. 



82 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

have my Italy as well as you. . . . It is called Tribschen [the 
name of Wagner's villa] : and I am already at home in it. 
Dearest friend, what I there learn and see, hear and under- 
stand, is indescribable. Believe me, Schopenhauer and Goethe, 
^schylus and Pindar still live. ' ' 12 The happiness of these 
years was never forgotten by Nietzsche; after he broke with 
Wagner, and when he was criticising and dissecting him in 
perhaps unmerciful fashion, the memory of them haunted him. 
"How often/' he writes to Peter Gast in 1880, "I dream of him 
and ever in the manner of our old confidential relations. Never 
was an evil word spoken between us, not even in my dreams, 
but very many cheering and glad ones, and with no one per- 
haps have I so often laughed. It is past now — and what matters 
it that in many points I am in the right against him! As if 
that lost sympathy could be wiped out of my memory ! " 13 And, 
though Nietzsche was the reverential admirer and disciple, he 
gave as well as received. The music in the third act of "Sieg- 
fried" is said to be partly owing to his influence — his sister 
telling us that Wagner often assured her that his coming to 
know Nietzsche had inspired him to this music, for he [Nietz- 
sche] had given him back his faith in the German youth and 
in the future. 14 Moreover, Wagner took over from him the 
conceptions of "Dionysiac" and "Apollinic" as principles of 
art* His appreciation of Nietzsche was strong and warm. 
"After my wife," he wrote him at this time, "you are the one 
prize which life has brought me"; and again, "Before God I 
declare that I believe you to be the one person who knows what 
I want to do." 15 

The relationship with Wagner and the issues involved were 
so great in Nietzsche's eyes, d that he more or less reshaped his 
scholar's life accordingly. He had been lecturing on Greek life 
and philosophy, and was preparing an extensive work on the 
subject, 6 and now he took some of the material and made a little 
book of it by itself, which he dedicated to Wagner. His ultimate 
aim in the book was to show that, as the tragic view and tragic 
art had marked the great epoch of the Greeks, a similar view 

12 Ibid., II, 167. 

18 Ibid., IV, 356; cf. Ecce Homo, II, §§5, 6. 

14 Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, ix. 

18 Brief e. Ha. 85. 131. 



RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 83 

and art were needed for another great culture today, and that 
Wagner was pointing the way. It was The Birth of Tragedy. 
It offended purely philological circles, but it served its purpose 
none the less ; f and the light it threw on old Greek life is per- 
haps more important than was commonly thought at the time. g 
Wagner circles, and above all Wagner himself, were profoundly 
stirred. He went freshly to work on the last act of " Gotter- 
dammerung," and said he knew not how he could have been so 
fortunate. Nietzsche was even ready to go about Germany 
giving lectures in behalf of the Bayreuth idea, and composed 
an "Appeal to the German nation/' h In May, 1872, he was 
one of the reverent company that attended the laying of the 
corner-stone of the Bayreuth theater, and listened to the strains 
of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony rendered under the master's 
direction. "There was something in the air," he said in com- 
menting on the occasion, "that I have nowhere else experienced, 
something quite indescribable and of richest promise. ' ' 16 

About this time Wagner left Tribschen for his permanent 
home in Bayreuth, and Nietzsche did not see him so frequently 
thereafter. The idyllic period in their mutual relations proved 
to be over. The physical separation may have given Nietzsche 
an opportunity for critical reflection such as he had hardly had 
before; in any case, questionings, doubts began to arise, and 
somewhat clouded his simple faith. Yet his main feeling con- 
tinued to be that of loyalty, and he not only wrote pamphlets 
or little books to serve the general cause of a new culture (the 
first three Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen), but a special one 
on Wagner ("Richard Wagner in Bayreuth"). This last was 
at once an elaborate critical study and a splendid tribute. In 
it Bayreuth appears as a "morning consecration for the day 
of battle ' ' 17 — the book published on the eve of the opening in 
1876. It was really an appeal and a challenge to the German- 
speaking peoples on Wagner's and Bayreuth 's behalf. 1 Wagner, 
quite overcome, wrote to him, "Friend, your book is immense. 
. . . Where did you get the knowledge of me?" and he urged 

16 Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches by Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, Vol. 
II, p. 77. That same summer he also witnessed a wonderful performance 
of "Tristan and Isolde" in Munich (along with his friends, Freiherr 
von Gersdorff and Fraulein von Meysenbug). 

17 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4. 



84, NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

him to come to the rehearsals soon to be given. Nietzsche came, 
at least to the opening performances — and with what effect I 
must now proceed to relate. 

IV 

To understand what happened, it is necessary to bear in 
mind all Nietzsche's idealism about Bayreuth. As the special 
scene of the master's activity, and as the center of redeeming 
influences that were to go out to the German people, it was 
almost holy in his eyes. In the book just referred to, he 
pictured gathered there the more serious, nobler spirits of his 
generation — men and women who had their home elsewhere than 
in the present and were to be explained and justified otherwise 
than by the present, or, to use another metaphor, were like a 
warm current in a lake which a swimmer encounters showing 
that a hot spring is near by. 18 You shall find — he said in sub- 
stance — prepared and consecrated spectators at the summit of 
their happiness and collecting energy for still higher achieve- 
ment; you shall find the most devoted sacrifice of artists, and 
the victorious creator of a work which is itself the result of 
victories all along the aesthetic line — will it not be almost like 
magic to witness such a phenomenon in the present time f Must 
not those who participate be transformed and renewed, and be 
ready themselves to transform and renew in other fields of 
lif e ? 19 Whatever misgivings lurked in his mind, he was still 
loyal. 

Yet what did he find when the Bayreuth performances 
began? I give the bare, brutal facts, as they are reported by 
his sister and other credible witnesses. The main distinction 
of a large number of those present seemed to be that they were 
able to pay the necessary nine hundred marks for the twelve 
performances. Some of the auditors bore great names — the 
German Emperor was present, and he drew a whole court in 
his train. Splendid toilets were observable — Marienbad in par- 
ticular seemed to have sent over a goodly number of its stoutish 
habitues (bankers and men of leisure, with their wives) : on 
round paunches dangled heavy gold chains, on high-swelling 
bosoms shone luxurious jewels, costly diamonds. In fact the 
18 Ibid., sect. 1. " Ibid., sect. 4. 



RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 85 

audiences were not unlike those of a first night at the opera 
generally. There was, it is true, a sprinkling of notable 
painters and musicians; and then there were fanatical Wag- 
nerians, with pale faces and waving manes, who were almost 
ready to threaten violence, if criticism of the master or his work 
was made. Intrigues between artists were to be overheard (or 
heard of) — exclamations of wounded vanity. In general there 
was a kind of artificiality in the enthusiasm. The performances 
themselves were halting. Wagner was too preoccupied and 
hurried to have any real intercourse with Nietzsche, and con- 
tented himself with loud and extravagant praise of his book — 
and this jarred on Nietzsche and untuned him the more. More- 
over, the master appeared in an unpleasantly realistic light — 
the air of repose was lacking, he had become stage-manager and 
even journalist ; he was flattering national passions, too, showing 
himself anti-French and anti-Semitic. It was hard for Nietzsche 
to endure; and after the first performances, he went off into 
the Bohemian Forest, burying himself at Klingenbrunn for ten 
days, and noting down a few thoughts in a new vein. Then 
he came back to Bayreuth and tried again — but to no avail, and, 
before the cycle of representations had finished, he left the 
town never to return. It was the beginning of the end. 

If we let this episode stand for more than it did at the 
moment, for the whole break with Wagner, we may say that 
the causes of the break were threefold: he was disappointed 
with the man, with his art, and with his way of thinking. 
Wagner had already proved at times to be a somewhat imperious 
and exacting nature. At the start Nietzsche responded to 
whatever was asked, and was even tender of the master's 
peculiarities. He yielded slightly, for instance, to Wagner's 
anti-Semitism, though going contrary to his own instincts in 
doing so. 20 Once, whether for this or other reasons — in any 
case, to avoid giving offense to Wagner — he gave up a projected 
journey with a son of Mendelssohn's to Greece; 21 and at other 
times he joined with friends in considering how best to spare 
one who was so easily touched. 22 But the time came when he 

20 See Arthur Drews, Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 160. 

21 So Richter, op. cit., p. 45. 

22 Brief e, II, 207. 



86 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

felt that Wagner was too insistent — suspicions, too, where there 
was no need to be; if he made any assertion of independence, 
Wagner seemed to resent it. The difficulties were smoothed 
over while Wagner was near at hand in Tribschen, but when 
he removed to Bayreuth (1872), misunderstandings sometimes 
lingered. Invitations involving so long a journey he could not 
always accept, and sometimes he was not exactly in the mood 
for accepting them. We find him touched, for instance, on 
hearing that Wagner had spoken coolly, and as if disappointed, 
about "The Use and Harm of History for Life," because there 
had been no mention of his [Wagner's] special cause in it; and 
once, when a friend told him that Wagner was taking it ill 
that he had not accepted an invitation, he replied that while 
he could not conceive how any one could be more loyal to 
Wagner than he was (if he could be, he would be), yet he must 
keep his freedom in minor points and abstain from too frequent 
personal intercourse to the very end of preserving his loyalty 
in the higher sense. 23 Two or three other circumstances may 
be mentioned. During one of his visits to Bayreuth, Nietzsche 
played the ' ' Triumphlied ' ' of Brahms, which he particularly 
liked. Wagner was not pleased, and fell into a passion at 
Nietzsche's praise — showed himself "not great," as Nietzsche 
remarked at the time to his sister. Then Wagner's stories and 
jokes in broad Saxon sometimes offended him — and when 
Wagner saw this, he seemed to ply them the more. In truth 
Wagner was a little of a Bohemian in manners and conversa- 
tion, and his occasional rudeness and coarseness wounded Nietz- 
sche's ideal sentiment about him. 24 Further, though, as stated, 
Nietzsche was slightly influenced, he could not really follow 
Wagner in his aversion for the Jews. Nothing perhaps shows 
better his natural nobility than his practically lifelong superi- 
ority to anti-Semitism — for though many excuses can be given 
for this sentiment, no noble nature can share it. 

But doubts were also insinuating themselves as to Wagner's 
art. Was there not acting in it at times, striving for effect? 
The ecstatic seemed often violent, was not sufficiently naive. 25 

28 Ibid., I, 236. 

24 Cf. Drews, op. cit., pp. 160-2; Theobald Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 65-6. 

26 Werke, X, 433, § 313; cf. Joyful Science, § 368. 



RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 87 

Moreover, was Wagner really true to the theory of the relation 
between music and words? " Danger lest the motives for the 
movement of the music should lie in the movements and actions 
of the drama, lest the music should be led instead of leading." 
Were there even possible contradictions in the idea of " music 
drama"? 26 The relation between music and words might be 
organic in a song, but how about a drama ? 27 The idea hovered 
in Nietzsche 's mind of a symphony covering itself with a drama, 
as a melody does with the words of a song — there were sugges- 
tions of such a thing in the old Dionysian chorus ; M but Wagner, 
he felt, was inclining to make the music a means of illustrating 
the drama — and this was to forget the lyric, Dionysiac quality 
of music altogether, and to bring ' 'music-drama' ' down to the 
level of old-time opera (only linking the music a little closer 
to the words and situations, and dispensing with trills and 
arias that had no sense). In time Nietzsche came to the clear, 
positive conclusion that either the music must dominate, or the 
drama must dominate, that parallelism was out of the ques- 
tion ; a and now he has feelings that way, and thinks that with 
Wagner the organic unity is in the drama and often fails to 
reach the music. 30 Wagner himself once said, "The nature of 
the subject could not induce me, in sketching my scenes, to 
consider in advance their adaptability to any particular musical 
form, the kind of musical treatment being, in every case, sug- 
gested by the scenes themselves." 31 So far as this was really 
Wagner's practice, the conclusion is inevitable: he starts with 
scenes, i.e., dramatic material, and then finds musical tones 
appropriate to them, which is just to reverse the method and 
theory of music in which Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer before 
him, believed — and, as -Nietzsche at first supposed, Wagner also. 
,' Besides all this, Nietzsche came to have doubts as to Wag- 
ner's general attitude and way of thinking. Was he main- 
taining his old heroic attitude to existing German life ? Was he 
not compromising, making too much of the Emperor's favor, 

28 Werke, X, 436-40. 

27 Ibid., X, 434, § 315. 

28 Ibid., XI, 101-2, §§ 313-4. 

29 Ibid., XI, 93, §276. 

30 Ibid., X, 433, §310. 

31 1 borrow this passage from the art., " Wagner," in the Encyclopedia 
Britannica (9th ed.). 



88 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

making too much of Bismarck, becoming too patriotic ? 32 And 
did they really think alike, he and Wagner, as to the culture 
to be? Was Wagner aiming at a renovated humanity, or was 
his art rather a way of escaping from reality, an end in itself? 
He puts down propositions like these as if to look at, consider 
them : Wagner 's art is something like a flight from this world — 
it denies, does not transfigure the world. Directly it does not 
work morally, and indirectly it has a quietistic effect. Wagner 
only wants to get a place for his art in the world. The kind 
of culture that would be introduced would resemble that of 
a monastery — its disciples would be a sect, without part in 
the world around them. There would come a sort of Christianity 
over again — was not this art a sort of pale dying Christianity, 
with plenty of magical gleams and enchantments, but little clear 
sunlight? Can a man actually be made better by this art and 
by Schopenhauer's philosophy? 33 Perhaps Nietzsche was hardly 
aware in all this how far he was changing — moving away from 
the view that reality was essentially unalterable and simply to 
be made endurable by art. A couple of years after the 
Bayreuth opening, he said, ' ' Wagnerians do not wish to change 
anything in themselves, live in disgust with what is stale, con- 
ventional, brutal. Art is to lift them as by magic above it all 
for the time being. Weakness of will" 34 — but he has a pre- 
sentiment to this effect now. He is also uneasy about Wagner's 
rejligious tendencies. He had thought him atheist, like himself 
and Schopenhauer, 35 had said, " Wagner is a modern man and 
is not able to encourage himself by believing in God. He does 
not cherish the idea that he is in the hands of a good Being, 
but he believes in himself. ' ' 36 But now he has to own that 
Wagner's art is in principle the old religion over again, "ideal- 
ized Christianity of the Catholic sort. " 37 He had been trying 
to put a favorable interpretation on the reactionary elements 
in him — the place given to the marvelous, to mediaeval Chris- 

32 Werke, X, 443; Drews, op. cit., p. 163. 

83 Werke, X, 448-9, § 353. 

84 Ibid., XI, 99, § 302. 

80 Cf. Nietzsche's sister's reference to intimate conversations which 
Wagner had held with Nietzsche and his friends, Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, 
xxiv. 

86 Werke, X, 441-2, § 329. 

87 Ibid., X, 448, § 352. 



RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 89 

tianity, to Buddhism, as well as to princes 38 — but at last they 
proved too much. We today can see that "Parsifal" was a 
further, more pronounced expression of the same tendencies; 
but "Parsifal" came later. 

A variety of dissatisfactions and doubts were thus at work 
in Nietzsche 's mind, and the revulsion at Bayreuth in 1876 
was only a culminating episode. 5 

I have said that Nietzsche left Bayreuth never to return. 
This does not mean, however, that there was an open break with 
Wagner. The two met in Sorrento the following autumn, and 
their relations were outwardly much as of old. But the old 
warm sympathy no longer existed between them — and one inci- 
dent estranged Nietzsche the more. Wagner was now at work 
on "Parsifal," and, as if aware that the composition of a play 
of just this character was hardly in keeping with the views 
he had so often expressed, he sought to explain to Nietzsche 
certain religious sensations he had been having, certain inclina- 
tions to Christian dogmas — as, for instance, how he had been 
edified by the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Nietzsche 
could only listen in silence — it seemed to him impossible that 
one who had been so outspoken and so thorough in his unbelief 
could go back; he thought that Wagner was practising on 
himself. It was another disillusionment. He noted down: "L 
am not able to recognize any kind of greatness which does not 
include honesty with oneself; playing a part inspires me with 
disgust; if I discover anything of this order in a man, all his 
performances count for nothing; I know that they have every- 
where down at bottom this theatrical character. " 39 k Despite 
even this there was no open break. This came two years later 
still — and in connection* with a singular coincidence. Nietzsche 
had finished a new book, Human, All-too-Human (the first 
product of what we may call his second period), and was 
sending copies of it to Wagner and Frau Cosima in Bayreuth, 
along with some humorous verses of dedication. But exactly 
at the same time there came to him from Wagner a beautiful 
copy of the text of "Parsifal," with the inscription, "Cordial 
greetings and wishes. to his dear friend Friedrich Nietzsche," 
and signed "Richard Wagner, Oberkirchenrath [member of the 

* s IMd., X, 457-8, § 365. 30 Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, xxiii. 



90 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

high ecclesiastical consist ory]." The ecclesiastical reference 
was too much for Nietzsche, and it seemed almost like a chal- 
lenge. Eeferring to the incident ten years afterwards, he said, 
"This crossing of two books — it seemed as if I heard with it 
an ominous sound. Was it not as if swords crossed? ... At 
any rate we both took it so ; for we both kept silent. " 40 So 
far as I know, there was no direct interchange between the 
two men thereafter. "Wagner was undoubtedly displeased by 
the new manner and tone of Nietzsche's book, its almost ex- 
clusively critical character, and Nietzsche on his side could 
only say to himself, ' ' Incredible ! Wagner has become pious. ' ' 
/"Parsifal," now in its final form, was in truth not only Chris- 
tian, it was Buddhistic, 41 — it was a glorification of celibacy, and 
implied an aversion to the fundamental premises of life ; it was 
pessimist, Schopenhauerian, in the worse senses of those words. 
For by this time — and really, except for a brief space, always — 
life was a supreme end to Nietzsche, and he revolted against 
those who would unnerve and weaken it. He thought they 
exercised a corrupting influence, and he felt the odor of cor- 
ruption in "Parsifal." Once he exclaims, "The preaching of 
chastity [i.e., celibacy] is an incitement to the unnatural: I 
despise every one who does not feel 'Parsifal' as an attack on 
morality " ffi [he is thinking, of course, of those who have some 
understanding of "Parsifal," not of the common run of our 
opera-goers]. Wagner's influence, he feared, would ultimately 
coalesce with the stream which arises "the other side of the 
mountains and knows also how to flow over mountains." 
"Parsifal" was not, to him, a genuine German product, it was 
"Rome — Rome's faith without words." 431 
/ The whole experience shook Nietzsche profoundly. In fact 
it became a turning-point — perhaps the great turning-point 
in his life. His faith in the future, in art as a redeeming 
agency and preparation for the future, his faith, I had almost 
said, in himself, hung on Wagner. "As I went further on by 

40 Ecce Homo, III, iii, § 5. 

41 Drews thinks Buddhistic rather than Christian (op. cit., pp. 188-92), 
agreeing with Pastor Kalthoff {Nietzsche und die Kulturprobleme unseret 
Zeii) that the Christian element is purely decorative. 

42 "Nietzsche contra Wagner," vii, §3. 

43 Werke, XI, 101, § 311, "Nietzsche contra Wagner," vii, § 1. 



RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 91 

myself," he wrote later, "I trembled; before long I was ill, 
more than ill, namely weary — weary from the irresistible dis- 
illusionment about everything that remains as inspiration to 
us modern men, about the everywhere wasted force, labor, hope, 
youth, love, weary from disgust with the whole idealistic falsi- 
fication and effeminacy of conscience, which had again won the 
victory over one of our bravest; weary finally and not least 
from the grief of a pitiless suspicion — that I was henceforth 
condemned to mistrust more deeply, to despise more deeply, 
to be more deeply alone, than ever before. For I had had no 
one but Richard Wagner." 44 He confessed to a friend, "I 
have experienced so much in relation to this man and his art: 
it was a whole long passion — I find no other word for it. The 
renunciation required, the finding myself again which at last 
became necessary, belongs to the hardest and most melancholy 
things that fate has brought me." 15 His mistake had been, 
he bitterly said, that he came to Bayreuth with an ideal. 46 He 
had painted an "ideal monstrosity"; "I have had the fate of 
idealists, whose object is spoiled for them by the very fact that 
they have made so much of it. " ' 47 

Yes, Nietzsche was ill — ill spiritually and ill physically; 
indeed he had more or less suffered physically ever since his 
period of service in the Franco-Prussian war, as noted in the 
opening chapter. In the summer of 1875 he had been obliged 
to go to a cure in the Black Forest — and now (1876) he has 
to ask for a year's leave from the University. 111 This is granted 
him with marked signs of favor from the authorities, and he 
goes to Italy. 48 

44 "Nietzsche contra Wagner," viii, § 1. 

45 Lou Andreas-Salome"* Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, pp. 84-5. 

46 Werke, XI, 122, § 385. 

47 Ibid., XI, 121, § 380. 

48 See the language of the "Protokoll," as cited in Werke (pocket 
ed.), Ill, xvii. 



SECOND PERIOD 

CHAPTER IX 

GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 



Nietzsche (now at the age of thirty-two) was not only ill, but 
self-distrustful — he scarcely knew whether he had a task any 
more or the right to one. 1 And as a physician on occasion sends 
his patients into new surroundings, so he, physician and patient 
r4n one, now sends himself to a new climate, in both the spiritual 
and physical senses of that word. 2 He had been living, he felt, 
in an atmosphere overcharged with idealism and emotion ; a cold 
water-cure was necessary. 3 He found himself with an uncom- 
mon desire to see men and their motives as they actually were. 4 
He also wanted to see himself more objectively — was ready to 
take sides against himself, if need be, and to be hard with 
himself; he had had his fill of illusions. Even the emotional 
attitude to objects in nature went against him. 5 He understood 
the mental evolution of Sophocles — the aversion he in time 
acquired to pomp and show. 6 In other words, the craving for 
knowledge, for a cool, clear view of things, became uppermost 
in him ; ideals, ideal aims, great expectations took a subordinate 
place. "Unmercifully I strode over wished-for and dreamed-of 
things which up to that time my youth had loved, unmercifully 
I went on my way, the way of knowledge at any cost." 7 "I 
took sides against myself, and for all that gave me pain and 
was hard." 8 

1 Preface, § 3, to Mixed Opinions etc. 

2 Preface, § 5, to ibid. 

3 Werke, XI, 123, § 391. 

'Ibid., XI, 121, §381; cf. 123, §389. 

5 Ibid., XI, 124, § 394. 

6 Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 469, § 147. 

7 Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, xxxiv. 

8 Preface, § 4, to Mixed Opinions etc. 

92 



GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 93 

All this, however, implies that though shaken and depressed 
he was not disheartened. The strong will for life was still in 
him. He afterward realized that he had simply passed from 
one stage of his life to another, and that the new was as natural, 
and, in a way, as healthful as the old. As early as 1878 he 
could write: ''I feel as if I had recovered from an illness; I 
think with unspeakable sweet emotion of Mozart's Requiem. 
I relish simple foods again." 9 Again, after referring to his 
having taken sides against himself and his predilection, "A 
much greater piece of good fortune thereby came to me than 
that on which I willingly turned my back. ' ' 10 Later he makes 
the general observation: "The snake that cannot shed its skin 
perishes. Even so with spirits hindered from changing their 
opinions — they cease to be spirit. ' ' u 

ii 

It is only summing this up formally to say that Nietzsche 
now passes into a new period — one which, though unintelligible 
apart from the first, is strongly contrasted with it. It lasts, 
roughly speaking, five or six years (from 1876 to 1881 or 1882). 
The literary output of it is fragmentary; at least it is made 
up of fragments — we have no longer connected treatises like 
The Birth of Tragedy, or "The Use and Harm of History 
for Life." Aside from the demands of his university work, he 
seems unable to write connectedly. He notes down his thoughts 
at odd moments — often when out on his walks or climbing. As 
the jottings accumulate, he selects from them, works them over, 
gives them a semblance of order, and makes a book. The three 
books which belong wholly to this period, and two more, which 
may be said to make the transition to the next, consist of 
aphorisms, sometimes covering three or four pages, but for the 
most part so brief that several of them appear on a page. They 
are Human, All-too-Human (1878), Mixed Opinions and Say- 
ings (1879), The Wanderer and his Shadow (1879), 12 the transi- 

9 Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 468, § 143. 

10 Ibid., IV, 441-2, § 22. 

11 Dawn of Day, § 573. 

12 These three books appeared in later editions in two volumes with 
a common title, Human, All-too-Human. I cite, however, for reasons of 
convenience, each one separately. 



94 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

tional volumes being Dawn of Day (1881), Joyful Science 
(1882). The first of these books follows a certain order, treat- 
ing successively of " First and Last Things," "The History of 
the Moral Sentiments," "The Religious Life," "Art and 
Artists," "Signs of Higher and Lower Culture," "Man in In- 
tercourse with Others," "Wife and Child," "The State," 
"Man Alone with Himself"; and the two succeeding volumes 
follow, though less certainly, the same order. In Dawn of Day 
and Joyful Science, order of any kind is but slightly perceptible. 

in 

Before taking up the new views in detail, let me note a few 
general marks of the period. In the first place, the spirit of 
change is on Nietzsche. He has known slight changes before; 
now it is a great change. Even his perspective of moral values 
is somewhat altered. He does not think, for instance, so highly 
of loyalty as he had. "I have not the talent for being loyal, 
and, what is worse, not even the vanity to wish to appear so. ' ' 13 
He raises the general question whether we are irrevocably 
bound by vows of allegiance to a God, a prince, a party, a 
woman, a religious order, an artist, a thinker, — whether they 
were not hypothetical vows, with the unexpressed presupposi- 
tion that the object to which we consecrated ourselves was really 
what we supposed it to be. Are we obligated, he asks, to be 
loyal to our errors, even when we see that by this loyalty we 
inflict injury on our higher self? "No, there is no law, no 
obligation of this sort; we must become traitors, practise dis- 
loyalty, surrender our ideals." And if it be asked why those 
remaining faithful to a conviction are admired, while others 
who change are despised, he fears the answer must be that only 
motives of vulgar advantage or personal fear are supposed to 
inspire change — a poor tribute, he thinks, to the intellectual 
significance of convictions. 14 Indeed, he suspects that passion 
and inertia have much to do with unchangeable convictions, 
and that the intellect, aspiring to be cool and just, is bound to 
be to this extent their enemy. He puts his ideal in words like 
these: "From the fire [of passion] set free, we move on im- 
pelled by the intellect from opinion to opinion, through 
ia Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 443, §28. 14 Human, etc., §629. 



GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 95 

alternation of parties, as noble traitors to all things that 
can in any way be betrayed — and yet without a feeling of 
guilt." 15 

Naturally he has a fresh sense of the uncertainty of things. 
We would not die for our opinions, he remarks, we are not sure j 
enough of them — though we might for the right to change 
them. 16a He has even the feeling of being more a wanderer 
than a traveler — for a traveler has a destination, and he for 
the time has none. 17 b He tells a parable, to which he gives the 
title, "The worst fate of a prophet": "For twenty years he 
labored to convince his contemporaries of his claims — at last he 
succeeded; but in the meantime his opponents had also suc- 
ceeded — he was no longer convinced about himself. " 18 He says 
(and here, too, we may be sure, he is thinking of himself) : 
"This thinker needs no one to refute him: he suffices to that 
end himself. " 19 I confess that in reading him I have some- 
times had the ironical reflection that he has an advantage for 
the student over most thinkers, in that you have only to read 
him far enough to find him criticising himself! — most philoso- 
phers leaving the most necessary task of criticising them to 
others. Somewhat in this line he suggests an unusual ethics 
of intellectual procedure. "We criticise a thinker more sharply 
when he advances a proposition that is displeasing to us; and 
yet it would be more reasonable to do this, when his proposition 
is pleasing" 20 — so easily, he means, do our likes and dislikes 
take us in. This is perhaps also what he means in the paradox : 
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than false- 
hoods" 21 — too much passion, interest, will to believe lurk in 
"convictions." From a like point of view, he finds practical 
occupation dangerous. "He who has much to do keeps his 
general views and standpoints almost unchanged." This is 
true even if a person "works in the service of an idea; he will 
no longer test the idea itself, he has no longer the time for 
doing so ; yes, it is against his interest to regard it as in general 
still discussable." 22 And yet, he asks, "wherein does the great- 
ness of a character consist, but in ability to take sides in favor 

15 Ibid., §§ 636-7. 18 Ibid., § 249. 

16 The Wanderer etc., § 333. 20 Human, etc., § 484. 

17 Human, etc., § 638. 21 Ibid., § 483. 

18 Mixed Opinions etc., §193. 22 Ibid., §511. 



96 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

of truth even against himself?" 23 "Never," he charges us, 
"hold back something, or hide from thyself what can be urged 
against thy thoughts! Vow to thyself! It belongs to the first 
honesty of thought. Thou must every day conduct thy cam- 
paign against thyself. A victory and a fortress won are not 
merely thy affair, but truth 's — and also thy defeat is not merely 
thy affair ! 7 a In much the same spirit he praises the strictness 
and severity of science. He thinks that one who devotes himself 
to scientific work does not look for approval of his success, but 
only for censure of his failures — like the soldier. 25 He points 
out the less noble motives in scholarly procedure: "One person 
holds fast to a view, because he imagines that he has come on 
it himself, another because he has learned it with labor and is 
proud to have grasped it — both then from vanity." 26 

We hear tones of irony, too. With a humiliating sense of 
disillusionment, he, as it were, takes it out in extravagances. 
He admitted in later years that in reaction from youthful en- 
thusiasms one easily goes too far; "one is angry on account of 
one 's youthful self-deception, as if it had been a sort of dishonest 
blindness, and by way of compensation is for a long time unrea- 
sonable and mistrustful toward oneself and on one's guard 
against all beautiful feelings. " 27 He speaks almost like a cynic at 
times of the part which unreason plays in human affairs, 28 and 
once quotes, not without malicious pleasure, a parody, which he 
calls the most serious he ever heard: "In the beginning was 
unreason, and the unreason was with God, and was God 
(divine) . " a Particularly does he let his irony play on idealists : 
they put their rainbow colors on everything ; if they are thrown 
out of their heaven, they make out of hell an ideal — they are 
incurable. 30 He is disgusted with his own previous moral arro- 
gance ; he wants to have a better knowledge of what he had 
despised — to be juster to his own time, of which he had said 
so many hard things. 31 For all this, he shows his identity with 
his former self in speaking of the power to lift things into the 
ideal as man's fairest power, though he adds that we should 

23 Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 450, § 66. 28 Human, etc., § 450. 

24 Dawn of Day, § 370. 29 Mixed Opinions etc., § 22. 

25 Joyful Science, § 293. 30 Ibid., § 23. 

26 Human, etc., §527. 81 Werke, XII, 213, §449. 

27 Werke /f XIV, 376-7, § 256. 



GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 97 

not let it tyrannize over us, since if we do, truth will some day- 
leave us, declaring "thou liar from the beginning, what have 
I to do with thee?" 32 

His strictly independent career now begins. Up to this 
time, he has been largely under the shadow of Schopenhauer 
and Wagner. Though never their slave, he now first stands 
quite on his own feet. c We find interesting general remarks 
on education, in which he puts what we receive from others in 
a secondary place. The young man, he notes, impatient of 
results, takes his picture of men and things ready-made from 
some philosopher or poet — he learns much thereby, but not a 
great deal about himself. So far as he is to be a thinker, how- 
ever, he must educate himself. The process of education at others' 
hands is either an experiment on something unknown, or else 
a kind of leveling to bring the new being into harmony with 
prevailing habits and customs; in either case it is a task that 
does not belong to a thinker, but to parents and teachers, whom 
some one with audacious honesty has called nos ennemis na- 
turels. It is only after one has been " educated " the longest 
while, that one discovers oneself — and then a thinker may well 
be helpful, not as a teacher, but as one who has taught himself 
and has experience. 33 Nietzsche even raises the question 
whether in this age of books teachers of the ordinary sort are 
not almost dispensable. 34 As few persons as possible, he ex- 
claims between productive minds and those hungry and ready 
to receive ! Let us look on the teacher as at best a necessary 
evil, like the tradesman — an evil to be reduced to its smallest 
possible proportions ! 35 Views like these, half jest, half earnest, 
are the reflection of his personal experience. It is not that he 
quite turns his back on his former teachers — after he has once 
found himself, he thinks there had been no harm in being among 
the enthusiasts and living in their equatorial zone for a while : 
he had in this way taken a step towards that cosmopolitanism 
of mind which without presumption might say, "Nothing be- 
longing to the mind is any longer foreign to me." 36 The very 
extremes of a man, he feels, may further the truth — now we 

82 Mixed Opinions etc., § 345. 85 Ibid., § 282. 

83 The Wanderer etc., §§ 266-7. 39 Mixed Opinions etc., § 204. 

84 Ibid., § 180. 



98 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

see one side of a thing and now the other, we cannot very well 
see both at once. 37 

I have said that now Nietzsche is first independent. The 
independence, however, shows itself more negatively than posi- 
) tively — the period is a critical rather than a constructive one. 
There is more analysis in it — particularly psychological analysis 
— than anything else. "Reflection about the human, the ail-too 
human, or, as the scientific phrase is, the psychological view" — 
such is in effect a description of its first and most characteristic 
book. 38 He is not so much in things and movements, as looking 
at them, above all at the human element in them. If he has 
construction in mind, it is principally in seeing what there is 
to construct out of — and in ruthlessly rejecting unsound ma- 
terial, all the vain imaginations of men. Sometimes it is called 
a positivistic stage — and there is a plain reaction against far 
flights of speculation; he wants life to rest on what is sure, 
demonstrable, not on the remote, indefinite, cloud-like 39 — but 
he is not positivist in any party sense. So it may be called a 
scientific stage — for at no other time does he give so high a 
place to science ; d still he does not become master in any par- 
ticular branch of scientific knowledge,* 5 and he thinks that the 
best and healthiest thing in science is, as in the mountains, the 
keen air that blows there. 40 

Partly perhaps because of the new turn his mind is taking, 
he appreciates the English as he never had before. He even 
ventures to say that they are ahead of all other peoples in 
philosophy, natural science, history, in the field of discovery, 
and in the spreading of culture, 41 and he speaks with admira- 
tion of the distinguished scholars among them who write scien- 
tific books for the people ffi — men, we must suppose, of the type 
of Huxley and Tyndall. The French, too, come in for praise. 
We find frequent references to Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, 
La Bruyere, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues, Chamfort. His style 
of composition is perhaps influenced by his study of these 
writers, for it has noticeably gained in simplicity and clearness, 
and is sometimes exquisitely polished — he owns himself that it 
has been often swollen and turgid before. He dedicates Human, 

87 Ibid., §79. 40 Mixed Opinions etc., § 205. 

"Human, etc., §35. 41 Werke, XI, 136-7, §435. 

19 The Wanderer etc., §§ 202-3, 310. * 2 Mixed Opinions etc., § 184. 



GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 99 

All-too-Human to the memory of a Frenchman, the hundredth 
anniversary of whose death was about to occur, Voltaire, calling 
him "one of the greatest liberators of the mind." 

rv 
It is a period which Professor Ziegler calls his " leanest.' ' 
Professor Riehl, on the other hand, finds it in many respects 
the most attractive and valuable; and Jacob Burckhardt pro- 
nounced Human, All-too-Human his "sovereign book." Much 
depends on the point of view. If one has above all the critical 
temper, if one is bent on analysis and skeptical of enthusiasm, 
if one distrusts metaphysics and high-soaring aims, in other 
words if one is a typical scholar or scientific man, the writings 
of this period are likely to appeal to him more than any others. 
Nietzsche is now anti-metaphysical, anti-mystical, anti-romantic 
a I'outrance. His passion for actuality makes him explore all 
the corners of life where the ideal throws a glamor over the 
real and rout it out. Or, to use a sardonic metaphor which he 
himself employs in a later retrospect, he lays one error after 
another "on ice" — with the result that it is "not refuted, but 
freezes." It is so, he says, with "the genius," with "the 
saint," with "the hero"; it is so finally with "belief," with 
so-called "convictions"; even "pity" cools off considerably, 
and "the thing in itself" freezes almost everywhere. 43 Yet a 
deep-seeing poet has said, 

" We all are changed by slow degrees, 
All but the basis of the soul," 

and it is true of Nietzsche. Actuality is not the whole of 
possible existence, and the passion for actuality was never the 
whole nor the deepest -thing in Nietzsche. Later on he came 
to realize this distinctly. His present phase is really one of "^\yx. 
transition — Riehl calls it an interlude. 44 f All the same, we 
may as well attend to it for the time, as if no other were to 
follow— in fact be like Nietzsche himself, who at first does not 
know whether anything more is to come. He ventures a sum- 
mary description of how men develop intellectually during 
their first thirty years: — Beginning with religious impulses as 
children and perhaps reaching the height of their impression- 

* 3 Ecce Homo, III, iii, § 1. 

4 * Riehl, op. cit., p. 58; cf. Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 101-2. 



100 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

ability at the age of ten, tending thereafter in a more scientific 
direction and keeping their religion in a weaker, pantheistic 
form, they at last leave the ideas of God, immortality, and the 
like quite behind, but yield to the charms of a metaphysical 
philosophy. In course of time, however, this too becomes in- 
credible. On the other hand, art appears to last, and for a 
while the metaphysics lingers as a form of art or as a trans- 
figuring artistic mood. But the scientific sense grows ever more 
imperative and conducts the full-grown man to natural science 
and history and especially into strictest methods of thinking, 
while to art falls an ever milder and more modest significance. 45 
Nietzsche thinks that this is a kind of epitome of the intel- 
lectual history of humanity — it is at least, we may say, a sum- 
mary of his own personal history down to and into his second 
period. 

Nietzsche had a friend at this time — really since 1874 — by 
the name of Paul Eee. He was a positivist of the French and 
English type. He had written a book, Psychological Observa- 
tions, which impressed Nietzsche, and during the winter of 
1876-77 they were together in Sorrento, where Ree wrote 
another book, The Origin of the Moral Sentiments, a copy of 
which he presented to Nietzsche with the inscription, "To the 
father of this book from its most grateful mother. ' ' g Un- 
doubtedly Nietzsche influenced him, and yet he as certainly 
influenced Nietzsche. He seems to have particularly directed 
Nietzsche's attention to Pascal and Voltaire and Prosper 
Merimee ; he was already in that world of historical study and 
of fine psychological analysis which Nietzsche was to make his 
own, and Nietzsche once humorously dubbed his new stand- 
point "Reealismus." Yet a radically determining influence 
may be doubted. h Nietzsche's general positivistic tendency 
really began as far back as when his first doubts arose as to 
Schopenhauer's metaphysical interpretation of the will. He 
speaks, indeed, of his "new philosophy," 46 but he is aware that 
"nature makes no leaps," and says that it is the task of the 
biographer to remember this principle. 47 This second period 
is only relatively, not absolutely distinguished from the first. 1 

48 Human, etc., §272. ** Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, xxxii. 

47 The Wanderer etc., § 198. 



CHAPTER X 
GENERAL OUTLOOK, AND ULTIMATE VIEW OF THE WORLD 



I consider first Nietzsche 's general outlook. The tragic back- 
ground of existence still remains for him; I forbear to quote 
fresh and varied statements to that effect. 1 His views of the 
older Greek life as somber, apart from the influence of the 
myths, is also continued ; only through art did man 's lot become 
enjoyable. 2 Nietzsche is now, however, in an unhappy state of 
mind about art. He has had a disillusioning experience, and 
art is under a shadow — to this extent, an easement and consola- 
tion is gone. It is not that he expressly abandons his former 
view, but it ceases to have relevance to the existing situation. 3 
For the moment he does not know but that the days of art are j 
over. 4 In answer to the question, why it continues in its cus- 
tomary forms — music, theaters, picture-galleries, novels, poetry 
— he says in a matter-of-fact and somewhat cynical way that 
idle people find it hard to pass their time without it. He adds 
that if the needs of these people were not met, either they 
would not strive so zealously for leisure, and envy of the rich 
would become rarer — which itself would be a great gain — or 
else they would employ their leisure in thinking a little — some- 
thing one can learn and unlearn — thinking, for example, about 
the sort of lives they are leading, their social relations, their 
pleasures; in either case, everybody, with the exception of the 
artists, would be better off. 5 He has more or less satire on 
artists themselves, or at least criticism of them. Men of science 



1 Cf ., for example, Human, etc., §§33, 71, 591; Mixed Opinions etc. y 
§22. 

2 Cf. Human, etc., §§261, 154, 222. 

3 Cf. Mixed Opinions etc., §§99, 174; Human, etc., §276; also a 
passage relating to Wagner quoted by Drews {op. cit., p. 163) which I 
cannot locate. 

* Cf. Human, etc., §§ 222, 223, 236. 

5 Mixed Opinions etc., § 175. 

101 



102 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

are the nobler natures; artists are effeminate in comparison 6 — 
and he puts himself out of their category, saying that they "find 
us non-artists a little too sober." 7 Poetry and music alike 
receive slighting comments. Poets are not worth as much as 
they seem to be: they throw a veil over their ideas, and we 
have to pay for the veil and for our curiosity to get behind it. 8 
Their thoughts often use a festive wagon of rhythm, because of 
inability to go afoot. 9 He doubts whether it is expedient for 
philosophers to quote from them, citing Homer's dictum, 
1 ' Singers lie much. ' ' 10 He suggests that poetry may have had 
a utilitarian and even superstitious origin — rhythm, like musical 
melody and the dance, being among primitive peoples a way 
of pleasing the Gods. 11 As for music, he systematically forbade 
himself for a time all music of a romantic sort, thinking that 
it begot too many desires and longings, made the mind unclear, 
feminized, its "eternal feminine" drawing us — down! 12a He 
has even occasional sarcasm for the genius. A thinker who 
takes himself in this way may, by begetting distrust in the 
cautious and sober ways of science, be an enemy to truth 13 — 
Nietzsche lays stress, as he never has before, on talents and 
industry. 1415 If ever he speaks of "genius" admiringly, he begs 
us to remember that we must keep the term free of all 
mythological and mystical associations. 15 The danger is that 
surrounded by incense, the genius begins to think himself some- 
thing superhuman; he develops feelings of irresponsibility, of 
exceptional rights and superiority to criticism. 16 Nietzsche 
mentions Napoleon in this connection ; but the man who is 
principally in his mind is undoubtedly Wagner. Professor 
Riehl asserts that wherever the word "artist" occurs in Human, 
All-too-Human, Nietzsche had first written "Wagner." 17 In 
fact he contemplated a new book on Wagner — one that would 
in a way expiate his former laudation (for he felt that he had 
led many astray) ; and now that Wagner was victorious, he 
could criticise him without violating his rules of literary war- 

9 Ibid., §§ 205-6. 12 Preface, § 3, to Mixed Opinions etc. 

7 Human, etc., § 236. 13 Human, etc., § 635. 

8 The Wanderer etc., § 105. " Ibid., §§ 163, 165. 
8 Human, etc., § 189. 15 Ibid., § 231. 

10 Joyful Science, §84. ,e Ibid., §164; cf. Dawn of Day, §548. 

11 Ibid., §84. 17 Op. cit., pp. 59, 60. 



GENERAL OUTLOOK 103 

fare 18 — extended preparatory notes for the book are to be 
found in his published remains. 19 He did not, of course, com- 
pletely identify the general with the particular — he still feels 
the greatness of the real genius, 20 sees the place of the poet, 
and gives a beautiful picture of the poetry of the future (as 
contrasted with the unripeness and excess mistaken for force 
and nature now), 21 is not even without appreciation for music 
of the right sort ; a c but in general, art recedes into the back- 
ground of his thought, and the realities of the world are faced 
in their unrelieved somberness and bareness. 

We might expect that in such circumstances Nietzsche would 
become pessimist absolutely. But this was not the case. He 
still has the Dionysiac will to live against whatever odds 
(though saying little of Dionysus) ; he has even a certain 
pleasure in probing life, partly to prove what he can endure 
and come out victorious over, and partly for the mere sake of 
knowing, the joy of energizing his intellectual self. In a most 
interesting preface to second editions of Mixed Opinions and 
Sayings and The Wanderer and his Shadow written some years 
later, he explains his peculiar type of pessimism. It was a 
pessimism which does not fear the terrible and problematical 
in existence, but rather seeks it; it is the antithesis of the 
pessimism of life-weariness, as truly as of all romantic illusion ; 
it is a brave pessimism, a pessimism that has a good will to 
pessimism, 23 i.e., as I should say, it is practically not pessimism 
at all. We have seen Nietzsche ready at the start to justify 
any kind of a world— no matter how irrational and unmoral — 
which could be aesthetically treated and turned into a picture; 
and we now find him ready to justify any kind of a world that 
can be turned into an object of knowledge. He thinks there is 
easement in this attitude too. We can transcend whatever is 
painful in experience by an objective contemplation in which 
pain has no part and the pleasure of knowing alone is felt, as 

18 See note b to chap, vi of this volume. 

19 Werke, XI, 81-102; more fully in the pocket ed., IV, 436-70. 

20 Mixed Opinions etc., §§378, 407. 

21 Ibid., §§ 99, 111. He is severe against "naturalistic" poetry, saying 
that the poets of great cities live too near " the sewers." 

22 Preface, § 3, to Mixed Opinions etc. Cf. Dawn of Day, § 461, on 
the possibilities of a new music, " unschuldige Musik," i.e., genuinely lyric. 

23 See §§ 3-7 of the preface alluded to. 



104 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

a sick man may for a moment forget his sickness in seeking 
to analyze and comprehend it. He speaks in so many words 
of psychological observation as one of the means of easing the 
burden of life. 24 The knowledge even of the most ugly reality 
is beautiful. 25 He has an appreciation of Socrates and his 
intellectual joy, such as he had not shown before; 26 he 'under- 
stands Goethe's rejoicing in the world as a man of science; 27 
he notes with satisfaction that thinkers as opposed as Plato and 
Aristotle agreed in finding the highest happiness for men and 
Gods in knowing, and even adds, ' ' The happiness of the knower 
increases the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sun- 
nier; knowledge puts its beauty not only around things, but 
permanently into things. " 28d He himself lives on in order 
ever better to know; his ideal is a free, fearless hovering over 
men, customs, laws, and traditional valuations; and in such a 
life, though he has renounced much, perhaps nearly all, that 
would seem valuable to other men, he is happy. 29 e Knowledge 
is the real end of existence — with the /'great intellect" the goal 
of culture Is Reached. Life "an instrument and means of 
knowledge," life "not a duty or a fatality or a deception," but 
"an experiment of one seeking to know" — this is now his view 
of it, his justification of it. 30f He goes so far as to say, "Knowl- 
edge has become for us a passion, which is alarmed at no sacri- 
fice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction. . . . 
Granting even the possibility of humanity's perishing from this 
passion for knowledge — even this does not overcome us! . . . 
Are not love and death sisters? Yes, we hate barbarism — we 
should prefer the destruction of humanity to the recession of 
knowledge! And finally: if humanity does not perish of a 
passion, it will perish of a weakness — which should we prefer? 
This is the supreme question. Should we rather have it end in 
fire and light, or in the sand ? " 31 g 

24 Human, etc., § 35. Riehl significantly remarks, " Through his dis- 
appointment with Wagner, Nietzsche was driven to science. He fled to it 
to escape from himself" {op. cit., p. 68). 

26 Dawn of Day, § 550. 

26 The Wanderer etc., § 86. 

27 Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 445, §38. 

28 Dawn of Day, § 550. 

29 Human, etc., § 34. 

30 Ibid., §292; Joyful Science, §324. 

31 Dawn of Day, § 429. 



GENERAL OUTLOOK 105 



ii 



And yet the concrete results of Nietzsche 's facing of reality, 
with no aid or comfort from art or metaphysical faith, are not 
pleasant for most of us to contemplate — were not indeed pleasant 
at the start for him. 32 How gladly, he says, should we exchange 
false ideas about a God who requires good of us, who sees 
whatever we do or think, who loves us and wishes our best good 
in all adversity, for truths that were equally salutary, quieting, 
and beneficent ! But they are not to be had ; philosophy at best 
gives us metaphysical plausibilities, and these at bottom are 
just as untrue. There is no way of going back to the old ideas 
without soiling the intellectual conscience. It is a painful sit- 
uation, but without pain one cannot lead and teach humanity, 
and woe to him who aspires to do this and has not his conscience 
pure ! 33 h This does not mean that Nietzsche is without appre- 
ciation of the services of religion in the past. He speaks of 
the deep indebtedness of music (Palestrina and Bach) to re- 
ligion, notes the impossibility of the blossoming of another art 
like that of the "Divine Comedy," Eaphael's paintings, Michael 
Angelo's frescoes, Gothic cathedrals, and does not regret that 
he lingered a while in the precincts of metaphysics and meta- 
physical art, and comes into the purely scientific camp a little 
later than some of his contemporaries. 34 All the same, religion 
and artist-metaphysics are now past for him. 1 One must have 
loved religion and art, he declares, as one loves mother and 
nurse — otherwise one cannot become wise; but one must also be 
able to see beyond them, to grow away from them — if one 
remains under their ban, one does not understand them. 35 The 
simple faith that all goes well for us under a loving God, so 
that there is no occasion to take life hard or complain, is the 
best and most vital remainder of the Christian movement, but 
with it Christianity passes into a gentle moralism — really it is 
the euthanasia of Christianity. 36 So confident, settled is his 

82 The results are not really new, but simply now first stated in 
detail. 

33 Human, etc., § 109. 

34 Ibid., §§219, 220, 234, 273. 
36 Ibid., §292; cf. § 280. 

36 Dawn of Day, § 92. 






106 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

conviction that he declares that if a man's attitude to Chris- 
tianity is not critical, we may as well turn our back on him. 37 

In the absence of theistic or metaphysical faith, the world 
becomes aimless, essentially meaningless to him. It is a kind of 
welter — history is so, as well as nature. 38 He thinks that an 
unprejudiced investigator who searches out the development of 
the eye, and observes the forms it has in the lowest creatures 
and its gradual growth, comes to the conclusion that see- 
ing was not an end aimed at, but simply happened, when 
chance brought the requisite apparatus together. 39 Even in 
man's inventions, accident, i.e., an accidental inspiration or 
thought, plays a part — only the accident does not happen to 
most men. 40 Reason itself may have come by accident into the 
world, i.e., in an irrational way. 41 For with chances of various 
kinds, it may sooner or later happen that some throws of the 
dice are so lucky that they have all the appearance of design ; ** 
the best kind of results may thus arise on occasion — happy 
hits, we may say, on nature's part. 3 Accordingly Nietzsche 
speaks of the chaos (rather than cosmos) of existence. 43 He 
does not mean that things happen without a cause, but apart 
from any plan or ordering thought: chance is the opposite of 
design, out of which correlation it means nothing. 44 Chance 
happenings have causes behind them like everything else, and 
hence are necessitated like everything else. 45 Law in nature, 
however, he regards as a questionable conception. If people 
are fond of it, they must either be thinking that all natural 
things follow their law in free obedience — in which case they 
really admire the morality of nature — or else the idea of a 

37 The Wanderer etc., § 182. 
88 Human, etc., § 238. 

39 Dawn of Day, § 122. 

40 Ibid., § 363. 

41 Ibid., § 123. 
*-Ibid., § 130. 
•» Joyful Science, §§ 109, 277. 

44 He goes so far as to argue on this basis that in nature at large 
there is, strictly speaking, no chance : " If you know that there are no 
aims, you know also that there is no chance: for only in connection with 
a world of aims has the word ' chance ' a meaning" (Joyful Science, 
§ 109). 

45 Once, it must be admitted, Nietzsche contrasts chance with neces- 
sity (Ecce Homo, II, §8), relapsing, we must suppose, for the moment 
into popular modes of expression. 



GENERAL OUTLOOK 107 

Creative Mechanician delights them. The conception is really 
an attempt to humanize necessity — a last refuge of mythological 
fancy. 46 

In this moving chaos man arises, with no end of causes 
behind him — but not from any superior design. 47 He arises, 
and he passes away — he is as perishable as any other creature. 
Some fancy that man is possessed of a soul in the sense of 
something separable from his bodily organization and capable 
of surviving it; Nietzsche does not think so. k "In former 
times the effort was to win a sense of the glory of man, by 
pointing to his divine origin: it is a forbidden way now, for at 
the door to it stands, along with other terrible creatures, the 
ape, who shows his teeth understandingly, as if to say: no 
further in this direction! So now we look in the opposite 
direction: the way whither humanity goes shall serve to show 
its glory and likeness to God. Alas, with this also nothing is 
proven ! At the end of this way stands the funeral-urn of the 
last man and grave-digger (with the inscription 'nihil humani 
a me alienum puto'). However high humanity may have 
developed itself — and perhaps it will be lower at the end than 
at the beginning — there is no transition for it into a higher 
order, any more than there is an ascent to god-likeness and 
eternity for the ant and the earwig at the close of their 'earthly 
course.' Becoming draws having been in tow after it: why 
should there be an exception from this eternal play for some 
little planet, or again for a little species upon it! Away with 
such sentimentalities!" 48 Another passage is to similar effect, 
"In the midst of the ocean of becoming, we awake on an island 
which is not bigger than a boat, we adventuring and wandering 
birds, and look around us for a little while : we do so as quickly 
and as curiously as possible, for how quickly may a wind blow 
us away or a wave sweep over the island, so that nothing is left 
of us! But here, in this little space, we find other wandering 
birds and hear of earlier ones — and so we live a precious moment 
of knowing and of guessing, with happy flapping of wings and 
twittering with one another, and in spirit venture out on the 
ocean, no less proud than it. ' ' 49 One might turn these pictures 

46 Mixed Opinions etc., §9. 4B Dawn of Day, §49. 

47 Cf. The Wanderer etc., §14. 4B Ibid., § 314. 



108 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

into abstract philosophemes, but it is unnecessary; nor need 
one comment on their mournful undertone. Sometimes, indeed, 
our mortality is spoken of in a different tone. Nietzsche was 
a man to accept things as they are and make the best of them — 
and once, after saying that "we have lost one interest, the 
'after death' question no longer concerns us/' he speaks of 
this as "an unspeakable benefit, too recent to be fully appreci- 
ated. " ^ He even asks if it is not shameless to wish an eternal 
continuance of ourselves. "Have you then no thought of all 
the rest of things that would have to endure you for all eternity, 
as they have endured you hitherto with a more than Christian 
patience ? " 51 But I suspect that he makes a virtue of necessity 
in speaking in this way ; his deeper feeling did not really 
change, and we shall come on traces of it in his last period. 52 
Nietzsche views man largely in what I may call a physio- 
/ logical light. Our consciousness is not the core of our being — 
it is intermittent, waxes and wanes ; as a late development of 
the organic, it is something imperfect and weak — it may lead 
astray as well as give help. 531 Among the signs of progress in 
the nineteenth century is to be reckoned the placing of the 
health of the body before that of the soul, and conceiving the 
latter as resulting from, or at least conditioned by, the former. 54 
A drop of blood too much or too little in the brain may make 
one's life unspeakably miserable and hard, so that we suffer 
mor^e from this drop than Prometheus did from his vulture. 55 
Varying foods may have varying spiritual effects. It is a 
question whether pessimism (of the ordinary type) may not be 
the after-effect of a wrong diet, the spread of Buddhism being 
an instance : K Nietzsche discourses especially on the danger of 
vegetarianism. 57 Possibly the European unrest of recent times 

80 Ibid., § 72. 
01 Ibid., §211. 
52 Pp. 173-4. 
83 Joyful Science, § 11. 

B * Will to Power, §§ 117, 126. I quote occasionally from later works, 
when Nietzsche's present views simply find further statement in them. 

55 Dawn of Day, § 83. 

56 Joyful Science, §134 — he takes pains to say "the spread of Bud- 
dhism {not its origin)." Pessimism is regarded as a symptom rather than 
a problem in Will to Power, § 38. 

67 Joyful Science, §145. Cf., on the effect of poor nourishment in 
general, The Wanderer etc., § 184. 



GENERAL OUTLOOK 109 

may have to do with the fact that "our forefathers, the whole 
Middle Ages, thanks to the effect of German propensities on 
Europe, were given to drink; Middle Ages — that phrase sig- 
nifies the alcoholic poisoning of Europe." 58 So fearfulness, 
from which so much evil comes in the world, is before all a 
physiological state. 59 Even the mental and moral disposition of 
those to whom the ascetic priest ministers may be explained 
physiologically; their "sinfulness" may be not so much fact, 
as an interpretation of fact, namely physiological depression. 60 
For a similar reason the views of old age should not be treated 
too reverentially, even when they are those of a philosopher, nor 
are we to give too much weight to the judgments we form at 
the end of the day: fatigue and weariness may be uncon- 
sciously reflected in them. 61 Morality itself may have a varying 
tinge according to physiological conditions: the morality of 
increasing nerve-force is joyous and restless ; that of diminishing 
nerve-force — in the evening or in the case of the sick or the 
aged — is of a passive, expectant, sad, or even gloomy char- 
acter. 62 Philosophy may also vary, according as it springs from 
a deficiency or from a superabundance of life-energy. Every 
philosophy which ranks peace higher than war, every ethics 
which has a negative conception of happiness, every metaphysics 
and physics which recognizes a finale, some kind of an ultimate 
state, every predominant aesthetic or religious longing for an 
apart, beyond, without, above, allows us to raise the question 
whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. In- 
deed the unconscious disguising of physiological needs under 
the mantle of the objective, the ideal, and the purely spiritual 
goes shockingly far, and Nietzsche says that he has often asked 
himself whether, broadly speaking, philosophy has not been 
principally hitherto an interpretation of the body — and a mis- 
understanding of the oodyP 

58 Joyful Science, § 134. 

59 Dawn of Day, §538. 

60 Genealogy of Morals, III, §§ 16, 17. 

61 Dawn of Day, § 542. 
82 Ibid., §368. 

98 Preface, § 2, to Joyful. Science. 



110 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

in 

Undoubtedly all this has a materialistic sound, and yet 
when we notice Nietzsche's ultimate philosophical views, we 
find that he is as far from materialism as ever. 64 This material 
organization on which our higher life is dependent is itself only 
statable in mental terms. Matter — the popular (and perhaps 
I might add, the popular scientific) notion of some kind of 
permanent self-existing substance — is illusory ; it is as much an 
error as the God (being) of the Eleatics. 65 We deal with phe- 
nomena (mental images) in the whole range of our knowledge. 
One set of them is connected with another set — that is all we 
can say. We speak of cause and effect, but we simply describe 
in this way — we explain nothing.™ The quality resulting from 
every chemical process is as much a wonder after as before ; so 
is a continuation of motion; nobody has "explained" push. 
And how could we explain ? We deal only with things that do 
not exist, i.e., lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, 
divisible spaces, all our own pictures and creations. Science is 
a humanizing of things — it is ourselves we learn to describe 
more accurately, as we describe things and their succession. 
Possibly, yes probably, there never is such a doubleness as we 
imply in speaking of cause and effect — there being before us 
in reality a continuum, from which we isolate now this piece 
and now that — just as, on the other hand, we think that we 
perceive motion, when we only conclude it, what we perceive 
being only isolated points. Our very imagery of cause and 
effect may thus prevent insight into the real connection. 66 All 
this is said by Nietzsche in general, but it applies to the point 
now in hand and shows that the assertions of the dependence 
of the mind upon the body must not be taken too literally." 

The fact is, so far as Nietzsche can see at present, we cannot 
get out of our mental being to explain it. Having concluded, 
after his analysis of Schopenhauer's metaphysical pretensions, 
that we do not know reality, but only our sensations or pictures 

•* Later (Genealogy of Morals, III, 16) he distinctly says that with 
a physiological view like that above described, one may still be the 
strictest opponent of all materialism. 

eB Joyful Science, § 109. 

"Ibid., § 112; Dawn of Day, § 121. 



ULTIMATE VIEW 111 

of reality, he is as hopelessly shut in to subjectivism as Kant 
was. Our own actions are essentially unknown, as truly as 
outer objects are. 67 In an aphorism entitled "In Prison, " he 
says, "There is absolutely no escaping, no way of slipping or 
stealing into the actual world. We are in our web, we spiders, 
and whatever we catch in it, we can catch nothing but what 
allows itself to be caught in our kind of web. " 68 In another 
place he speaks of the mind as a mirror: "if we attempt to 
consider the mirror in itself, we discover nothing but the things 
in it; if we try to lay hold of the things, we come finally to 
nothing beyond the mirror." 69 "Why does not man see things 
as they are? He stands in the way of them; he covers the 
things. ' ' 70 Once he even raises the question whether there are 
any things independent of us, 71 — he only raises it, however, for 
his practically constant underlying belief is that independent 
realities exist, however unknown. His attitude is strikingly (I 
might say, unconsciously) exhibited in a comparison of the 
world of our experience to a dream, in the midst of which the 
dreamer becomes sufficiently awake to know that it is a dream, 
and yet feels that he must go on dreaming, as otherwise, like 
a sleep-walker who must dream on if he is not precipitously to 
fall, he might perish. 72 The dream (appearance, Schein) is 
spoken of indeed as the active, living thing — a world of inde- 
pendent reality is practically ignored. And yet the very fact 
that he speaks of a dream, and of becoming half -awake in it, 
shows that the idea of independent reality shimmers in the back- 
ground of his mind, since a dream that is not contrasted with 
a waking state is not a dream at all. 

Practically then in this second period Nietzsche is shut up 
in the phenomenalist position, but with reservations or implica- 
tions which keep us from calling him a phenomenalist. He 
says on the one hand : we have no knowledge of reality — every 
metaphysical thought is far from the truth ; 73 even in religion, \ 

67 Dawn of Day, § 116; cf. Will to Power, § 477. 

68 Dawn of Day, § 117; cf. Joyful Science, § 57, where he makes light 
of the realists and their claim to see things as they are. 

69 Dawn of Day, § 243. 

70 Ibid., § 348. 

71 Ibid., §119. 

72 Joyful Science, § 54. 
78 Human, etc., § 15. 



112 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

art, morality we do not touch the nature of the world in itself — 
no surmise (Ahnung) we can make takes us beyond the realm 
of ideas (Vorstellung) ; 7i while many have died for their con- 
victions, it is probable that no one has ever sacrificed himself 
for the truth; 75 "philosophical systems" are shining mirages; 76 
"metaphysics might be described as the science which treats of 
the fundamental errors of man, as if they were fundamental 
truths." 77 But, on the other hand, he always implies that 
things have another manner of existence than that which they 
have in us. Even when he asserts that this other manner of exist- 
ence does not practically concern us and is as much a matter of 
indifference as a chemical analysis of the water would be to a 
sailor in a storm, he presupposes the other manner of existence ; 78 
even when he asserts that the questions of idealism and realism 
relate to a region where neither belief nor knowledge is necessary, 
a sort of nebulous swamp-land beyond the reach of investigation 
and reason, and pleads for our becoming good neighbors to 
the things that lie near, 79 he implies that the outlying region 
and swamp-land exist. Realistic implications are also evident 
in the strange suggestion that things as they exist in themselves 
may be far less significant than things as they appear, that the 
independent realities, which we covet so much to know, might, 
if we came on them, turn out so poor and empty that they would 
excite an Homeric laughter. 80 

Indeed, he thinks that men have not ordinarily sought truth 
in the past, but simply ideas that would be serviceable to them — 
continuing a line of thought on which we have seen him 
starting in the earlier period. The antithesis is implied in a 
general remark like the following: "As soon as you wish to act, 
you must close the door to doubt — says the practical man. And 

7 * ibid., § 10. 

75 Ibid., § 630. 

76 Mixed Opinions etc., § 31. 

77 This quotation I borrow from Riehl, op. cit., p. 61, being unable to 
locate it. 

78 Cf. Human, etc., § 9. 

70 The Wanderer etc., § 16; cf. Human, etc., § 532. He tries to preach 
a gospel of contented ignorance of first and last things in this period, 
and exalts Epicurus more or less as a model (cf. The Wanderer etc., 
§§7, 16). 

80 Human, etc., §§ 16, 29. Cf. also later utterances, Beyond Good and 
Evil, § 34; Genealogy of Morals, III, § 7; Will to Power, § 586B. 



ULTIMATE VIEW 113 

do you not fear to be deceived in this way? — answers the 
theoretic man." 81 For all such warnings, however, the prac- 
tical man goes on his way, and Nietzsche does not upbraid him. 
Truth may, of course, be useful, 82 but error may be useful too 83 — 
we have no guarantee that it is always the true that is helpful 
to life; there is no pre-established harmony between the two. 81 
The illogical man has often been useful or even necessary — 
and so with the departure from perfect justice in judgments, 
so with error about the worth of life. 85 Illusions may be a 
source of force, and it might be well if there were two com- 
partments in man 's brain, one for illusions, the other for science 
to regulate them and keep them from doing harm. 86 Without 
two capital errors, belief in identity and belief in free-will, 
mankind, in any distinctive sense, would never have arisen — 
for, to mention only the second, its ground feeling is that man 
is free in a world of unfreedom, a marvelous exception, a super- 
animal, half a God. 87 Doubt, intellectual scrupulousness, only 
arise late, are always relatively weak factors in human life, 
and really can only be allowed a limited role there. 88 Philosophy 
itself — what has gone by that name — has ordinarily been ani- 
mated by concern not so much for " truth,' ' as for health, 
growth, power, life, and the future — Nietzsche knows that it 
is a daring proposition to throw out, but he ventures it. 89 Errors 
may even have a part in making reality — in making character, 
for instance, and in making history. 90 Pretend to a virtue 
(kindness, honor), and the result may be in time that you 
have it ; 91 act on a belief, and you may win it — as Bonier said to 
Wesley, "Preach the faith till you have it, and then you will 

81 Dawn of Day, §519.. 

82 He even asks why, if science were not linked with the usefulness 
of what is known, we should concern ourselves about science (Mixed 
Opinions etc., § 98) . 

88 Ibid., §§ 13, 26. 

84 Human, etc., §517; cf. §§30, 36, 38, 227. He even says, "Error 
has made men out of animals [the reference is to the ideas of responsibility 
and free-will, see ante, p. 55] ; is it possible that truth may turn man 
-again into an animal?" (Human, etc., §519). 

85 Ibid., §§31-3. 
88 Ibid., § 251. 

87 The Wanderer etc., § 12. 

88 Joyful Science, §§ 110, 121. 

89 Preface, § 2, to Joyful Science. 

90 Dawn of Day, §§ 115, 307. 

01 Ibid., § 248; cf. Joyful Science, § 356. 



114 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

preach because you have it." 92 Errors, when useful to life, 
may in time become incorporated in the living organism and 
act as impulses there. 93 Yet errors are errors, whatever their 
effect, whatever their beneficence. The question of the useful- 
ness of an idea is separate from that of its truth. 94 Not only 
does the agreeableness or comfort of an opinion prove nothing, 
its necessity to life proves nothing — among the conditions of 
life, error may be one. 95 

92 Dawn of Day, § 325. 
9 » Werke, XI, 425-6. 
04 Human, etc., §§ 30, 36. 

85 Ibid., §§ 120, 131, 161, 36, 635 (the inspiring and invigorating not 
thereby true), Dawn of Day, §§ 90, 424, 73, Joyful Science, § 121. 



I 



CHAPTER XI 
ATTITUDE TO MORALS 

In turning to Nietzsche's attitude to morals in this period, I 
find it convenient to distinguish between his views about moral- 
ity and his own moral views. For morality may be taken as 
an historical phenomenon like any other, and studied and 
analyzed ; and it is in fact the critical analysis of morality as 
an objective fact in history which now chiefly engages him. At 
the same time he puts forth ethical views of his own to a limited 
extent. 



First, then, as to historical morality. Here too as in the 
theoretic realm he comes on elements of illusion. Man thinks 
he is free, and thereby distinguished from the animal world; 
notions of responsibility, of desert, of guilt, habits of praising 
and blaming, of rewarding and punishing, arise. But Nietzsche 
sees no way out of determinism. Causes lie behind human 
actions as behind all other events in nature. That in given cir- 
cumstances a given individual might have acted otherwise than 
as he did is something he cannot admit ; and it is only turning 
this around to say that the consciousness of freedom is illusory. 
Kant and Schopenhauer had saved themselves from this con- 
sequence by postulating^ metaphysical being for man — saying 
that while as a phenomenon in time his actions are determined, 
his real being is timeless and not subject to the laws of phe- 
nomenal succession. But Nietzsche has now left metaphysical 
views behind (at least, they no longer count for him) — and this 
way of escape is not open. a 

Seeing illusion in free-will is nothing novel, b and if there 
is any novelty in Nietzsche's procedure at this point, it is in the 
thoroughgoing way in which he follows up the consequences of 
the admission. I mention them simply as he states them — and 
he hardly more than states them, deeming extended argumenta- 

115 



116 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

tion superfluous. The consequences are far from agreeable in 
some cases. For example, responsibility goes, and he calls it 
a bitter drop — "the bitterest which one bent on knowing must 
swallow. ' ' 1 Through feelings of responsibility man has lifted 
himself out of his animality: it was a necessary illusion 
("Moral ist Nothliige") ? Yet the conclusion is inevitable: 
without freedom, no responsibility. We are as responsible for 
our dreams as for our waking conduct — that is, we are responsi- 
ble for neither. Cruel men are no more responsible for what 
they do, than granite is for being granite. 3 Guilt also goes. 
Although judges of witches and witches themselves have been 
convinced of their guilt, there was no guilt, and it is so with 
guilt of every kind. 4 Desert of praise or blame goes (which is 
not saying that either may not be dealt out for effect) ; 5 c and 
so with praising and blaming ourselves. Bad conscience is like 
a dog biting against a stone — a stupidity. 6 Giving way to 
remorse is to add to our first folly a second; if we have done 
harm, let us do good — this is the better way. 7d Indeed, things 
being necessarily what they are, "wrong" in any absolute sense 
disappears from the universe, and "ought," as contradictory 
to what is, becomes meaningless. 8 All actions are innocent; 
even the emancipated individual who becomes "pious" again 
(a type Nietzsche particularly dislikes) only does what he has 
to do — though it may be a sign of degeneration going on within 
him. 9 Revolutionary and more or less unwelcome as all this is, 
Nietzsche sees compensations, and in some ways has a sense of 
relief — for the dark shadow of sin vanishes and the world is 
clothed in innocence again. 10 Later on he says along this same 
general line, though with a special shade of meaning [he has 
been speaking of the liberating effect of comparative studies], 
"We understand all, we experience all, we have no longer 

1 Human, etc., § 107. 

2 Ibid., § 40. 

8 Dawn of Day, § 128; Human, etc., § 43; cf. Will to Power, § 288. 
* Joyful Science, § 250 ; cf . Mixed Opinions etc., § 386. 
Human, etc., § 105; cf. Will to Power, § 318. 

6 The Wanderer etc., §38; cf. Human, etc., §133. 

7 The Wanderer etc., § 323. 

8 Human, etc., § 34. 

9 Daivn of Day, §§ 148, 56. As to the innocence of becoming in general, 
Bee later utterances, Werke, XIII, 127, § 289; XIV, 308, § 141. 

10 Human, etc., §124. 






ATTITUDE TO MORALS 117 

hostile feeling in us. . . . 'All is good' — it costs us effort to 
deny. We suffer, if we are ever so unintelligent as to become 
party against a thing"; he even suggests that in this way 
scholars best fulfil today the teaching of Christ. 11 If we bid 
farewell to a passion, he would have us do it without hate — 
otherwise we learn a second passion ; he thinks that the souls of 
Christians, which have freed themselves from sin, are usually 
ruined by the hatred of sin — "Look at the faces of great Chris- 
tians ! They are the faces of great haters. ' ' 12 

Nietzsche becomes very warm against punishment — he would 
banish it out of the world. 13 It is really anger and revenge, 
to which we give a good name so as to have good conscience in 
inflicting it. e The truth is that the evil-doer is not even the 
same person that he was when he committed the evil deed; we 
punish a scapegoat. In any case, the punishment does not 
purify him, is no expiation ; on the contrary, it soils more than 
the transgression itself. 14 The punishment here in mind is that 
which masks as justice (the wrong-doer receiving his deserts) ; 
viewed as a deterrent, however (whether for others or for the 
wrong-doer himself in the future), and wrought in that spirit, 
Nietzsche does not question but rather asserts its utility. The 
wrong-doer by suffering it benefits society, and a sense of this 
should determine his mood, which should not be remorse, but 
the feeling that having done evil, he is now doing good — he 
should be free to consider himself a benefactor of humanity. 15 
Nietzsche is also troubled about the way society has to proceed 
to protect itself against crime — about the tools it has to create 
and make use of, the policemen, jailors, executioners, not for- 
getting the public prosecutors and the lawyers; indeed, "let 
one ask whether the judge himself and the punishment and 
the whole course of judicial procedure are not in their effect 
on non-criminals depressing rather ^than elevating phenomena. " 
As often, he says, as we turn men into means to the ends of 
society and sacrifice them, all our higher humanity grieves. 16 

11 Will to Power, §218. 

12 Dawn of Day, § 411. 

18 The Wanderer etc., § 183; Dawn of Day, §§ 13, 202. 
"Dawn of Day, §§ 252, 236. 

10 Human, etc., §105; The Wanderer etc., §323. 
10 The Wanderer etc., §186. 



/ 



118 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

He is aware that there is some danger to society in the doctrines 
of general human innocence and unresponsibility — they might 
throw courts and the course of civil justice out of gear; there 
was similar danger, he observes, in the teaching of Jesus to just 
the opposite effect, namely that since all are sinful, they should 
not judge one another. 17 But Nietzsche is no revolutionary, and 
while he wished to see civil institutions purged of the spirit of 
revenge, he had no desire to abolish them. He did not even 
oppose capital punishment, and wished to allow an incurable 
criminal, who became a horror to himself, to end his own days. 
His concern was chiefly for a point of view, namely, that the 
criminal is one deranged or sick, and should be treated as such 
— not then with patronizing compassion, but with a physician's 
penetration, a physician's good will: he has subtle reflections 
to offer in this connection on the psychology of crime. 18 One of 
his hopeful thoughts for the future is that there will be institu- 
tions where men can betake themselves for spiritual cures, 
according to their varying needs — in one place, anger would be 
fought, in another lust, and so on. 19 f He can also imagine indi- 
viduals and whole groups abstaining from recourse to the courts 
on their own account, after the primitive Christian fashion. 20 
As for himself he says, ''Better allow yourself to be robbed 
than have scarecrows about you to prevent it — such is my 
taste." 21 * 

i 

ii 

Nietzsche also criticises certain ideas which come nearer the 
content of morality. He fincjs an element of illusion in the view 
that good impulses and evil impulses differ in kind. He thinks 
that in all man does, he acts for his preservation, his pleasure, 
his advantage. 11 Some actions are, however, more intelligent than 
others, and this fact gives rise to diverse judgments. It is a view 
not unlike that of Socrates and Plato, who held that man always 
does the good, i.e., what seems so to him, according to the grade 
of his intellect, the measure of his rationality. Acts called evil 
are really stupid. Good acts are sublimated evil ones; evil acts 

17 Ibid., § 81. 20 Ibid., XI, 377, § 573. 

18 Dawn of Day, § 202. 2l Joyful Science, § 184. 

19 Werke, XI, 377, § 573. 



ATTITUDE TO MORALS 119 

clumsy, unintelligent good ones. In accordance with such an 
understanding of things, Nietzsche raises the question whether 
humanity might not transform itself from a moral into a wise 
humanity. 22 * 

Especially is there illusion in the idea of unegoistic actions, 
by which Schopenhauer, and he himself at the outset, had set 
such store. He by no means denies the genuineness of the 
actions which go by that name; he throws no suspicion on the 
reality of benevolence, self-sacrifice, heroism — his reasoning is 
different from that of La Rochefoucauld; but he thinks that 
when we look for the ultimate source of such actions, we 
find the same desire for personal gratification leading to them 
which leads to all other actions. 23 A mother, for instance, gives 
her child what she denies herself — sleep, the best food, on 
occasion sacrificing her health and her means. Is this to be 
treated as an exception to the rule of human conduct — a wonder 
in the world, something, as Schopenhauer said, "impossible 
and yet actual"? Or is the fact simply that the mother sacri- 
fices certain impulses to other impulses, yielding to the strongest 
— that she nowise differs, so far as the psychology of the matter 
goes, from a stubborn person who would rather be shot than 
go a step out of his way to accommodate some one else ? 24 We 
do not and cannot cease to be egos seeking for personal gratifica- 
tion, no matter what we do. And yet Schopenhauer thought 
unegoistic motives the essential mark of a moral action — and 
the idea is not uncommon today. 25 j 

Again, morality tends to draw the line so sharply between \ 
good and evil that one cannot be supposed to come out of the 
other. Nietzsche, however, finds evil sometimes passing into 
good. The passions excited in war, the impersonal hate, the 
cold-blooded killing with good conscience, the proud indifference 
to great losses, may in time be translated into spiritual equiva- 
lents, and add to the sum of available energy in the workshops 
of the mind. 26 Destruction and the destructive spirit may pre- 
pare the way for new things under the sun, new forms of life. 

22 Human, etc., §§ 102, 107. 

23 Cf. The Wanderer etc., §20; Dawn of Day, §103. 

24 Human, etc., §57; cf. Werke, XI, 327, §439. 
26 Human, etc., § 133. 

"Ibid., §277. 



120 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

As mighty glaciers hollow out valleys and in time leave meadows 
and woods and brooks in their track, so frightful human ener- 
gies — what we commonly sum up as evil (das Bose) — may be 
cyclopean architects and road-builders of humanity. 27 Even 
deception, violence, ruthless self-interest may play a part — 
and a genius of culture might employ them with so sure a hand 
that he would seem like an evil demon, and yet his aims, now 
and then shining through, be great and good, and he himself 
have angel wings. 28 We cannot build good "on good alone," 
as Wordsworth's "Happy Warrior" does — at least on what is 
commonly called good. A spirit of contradiction may lie at 
the basis of one man's virtue; a readiness to agree at the basis 
of another's; a third may draw all his morality out of his 
lonely pride, and a fourth out of a social impulse. That is, what 
is called evil, as well as what is called good, may be the basis 
of good, and the most inept teacher of the four types of indi- 
viduals mentioned would be the moral fanatic who failed to 
bear this in mind. 29 

The very ideas of what is good or evil may vary. A lonely 
man may console himself by thinking that he is ahead of his 
time; but the world may not go his way. 30 Even a good con- 
science does not necessarily attend a good man. Science is 
something good, and yet it has often come into the world 
stealthily, in roundabout ways, feeling like a criminal, or at 
least like a smuggler. Good conscience has as its first stage bad 
Conscience — for everything good is sometime new, i.e., unusual, 
against use and custom, unmoral [in the primitive sense of 
that term — the German here is wider die Sitte, unsittlicJi], 
and gnaws at the heart of its discoverer. 31 In other words, 
good conscience is a late fruit of bad conscience. 

in 

All this, however, does not mean that there is nothing 
constant in morality — that in a broad way it is not a tolerably 
distinct and recognizable phenomenon in history. What is 

"Ibid., §246. 

28 Ibid., § 241. 

29 The Wanderer etc., §70; cf. Mixed Opinions etc., §91. 

80 Human, etc., § 375. 

81 Mixed Opinions etc., § 90. 



ATTITUDE TO MORALS 121 

most constant about it is its form ; but within limits the content 
of it tends to be constant, too. 

Historically speaking, that conduct is always moral, ethical 
(moralisch, sittlich, ethisch) which conforms to a long-estab- , 
lished law or tradition. The fundamental antithesis is not j 
between "unegoistic" and "egoistic," but between being bound / 
and not being bound by traditional law. To practise revenge 
is moral, if revenge belongs to established custom — as it did 
among the older Greeks. A feeling of respect for what is 
authoritative is the fundamental note; and the older, i.e., the 
more authoritative, the custom, the greater the respect, until at 
last the custom becomes holy and the respect turns into rever- 
ence. The morality of piety, Nietzsche remarks, is a much older 
morality than that which calls for unegoistic actions. 32 For 
most of us even now the content of conscience is what was 
regularly required of us apart from any reason when we were 
young by those whom we revered or feared: when we ask 
"why?" we leave the realm of conscience proper. 33 "Good," 
as more than "moral," is applied to those who obey the tradi- 
tional law as if by nature, after long inheritance, hence easily 
and gladly. 

How the customs of a community arise is another question — 
one which belongs rather to history or sociology than to ethics. 
Only after they exist do moral distinctions have a meaning. 
Nietzsche attributes them broadly at this time to the com- 
munity's instinct for self-preservation. Such and such prac- 
tices are seen [supposed] to be useful to the community, hence 
they are favored. They may be of the most varied character — 
some may not really be -beneficial to the community, but being 
thought to be they become part of customary law. 34 Moral 
action is thus at bottom adoption by the individual of the com- \ 
munity's point of view. Utility is the standard, but public not 
private utility. 35 The logic is: the community is worth more 
than the individual, and a lasting advantage is to be preferred 
to a fleeting one, hence the lasting advantage of the community 

82 Human, etc., § 96. 

83 The Wanderer etc., §52; cf. §212. On fear as a moral motive, 
see Werke, XI, 208-11. 

84 Human, etc., § 96. 

35 The Wanderer etc., § 40. 



122 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

is to be placed unconditionally before the advantage of the indi- 
vidual, particularly his momentary well-being, but also before 
his lasting advantage or even his continuance in life. If the 
individual suffers from an arrangement which benefits the 
whole, if he is stunted, goes to pieces on its account — the custom 
must none the less be maintained, the sacrifice made. This is 
from the community's point of view. The individual himself 
may think differently; he may invert the propositions and say 
in his own case that the individual is worth more than the 
many, and that present enjoyment — a moment in paradise — is 
to be rated higher than a dull continuance of indifferent states. 
But the community has the upper hand, and in it and under 
it the individual is trained — trained not as an individual, but 
as a member of a whole, one of a majority; and the normal 
outcome of the training is that he takes the side of the majority 
(der Einzelne sich selbst majorisirt) : this indeed is what moral- 
ity essentially means. 36 

The training is a long historic (one might say, prehistoric) 
process. In subjecting individuals, checking their egoisms, 
binding them together, the community operates at first more 
or less by force ; it struggles long perhaps with their selfishness 
and wilfulness. Only late does free obedience arise. But when 
this is reached and it becomes at last almost instinctive, pleasure 
coming to be associated with it, as with all things habitual and 
natural, it receives the name of virtue. 37 Individuals now not 
merely submit willingly to the ordinary social restrictions, they 
are ready to sacrifice on occasion, not holding back their very 
life. And this, not in violation of the general psychological 
law already mentioned that every one seeks personal gratifica- 
tion, but because gratification is now found in doing whatever 
serves the common weal. 38k 

In the course of this developmental process there is another 
result. As stated, morality has its basis in social utility. But 
in time actions come to be performed without thought or even 
knowledge of this — perhaps from fear or reverence for those 

88 Mixed Opinions etc., § 89. 

"Human, etc., §§99, 97; The Wanderer etc., §40. 

88 Cf. Human, etc., § 57, as to the soldier's sacrifice; also Werke, IX, 
156, as to the state as perhaps the highest and most reverend object 
which the blind and egoistic mass in the ancient world knew. 



ATTITUDE TO MORALS 123 

who immediately require them, or from being accustomed from 
childhood up to see others perform them, or from benevolence, 
since the practice of them creates joy and approving faces 
everywhere about one, or from vanity because they are praised. 
In other words, the original reason for the action (or the 
custom to which it conforms) is lost out of mind: the custom 
stands as a thing by itself — actions that conform to it are good 
on their own account. Now such actions are called moral par- 
ticularly — not of course because they are done from any of the 
special minor motives mentioned, but because they are not done 
from motives of conscious utility. 39 1 A late echo of such a view 
appears, I may add, in Kant's treating reverence for the law, 
irrespective of any utilitarian considerations, as the only prop- 
erly moral motive. A second reason for the traditional contrast 
between morality and utility has been already hinted at. Com- 
munities had to struggle long with individuals seeking their 
own advantage or utility — so long and so hard, that every other 
motive came to be rated higher than utility. It appeared then 
as if morality had not grown out of utility, while in truth it 
grew out of social utility, which had great difficulty in putting 
itself through against all manner of private utilities. 40 

Customs and customary norms widely vary — indeed, so 
widely that, since morality is simply conformity to them, there 
may seem to be nothing really constant about it. And yet 
Nietzsche notes that some actions are quite universally regarded 
as good and others as evil, inasmuch as they affect a com- | 
munity's welfare in such direct and obvious ways. Amid 
all the variations of norms, benevolence, pity, and the like 
are universally regarded as useful, and at the present time 
it is pre-eminently the kindly, helpful individual who is called 
"good." So to injure one's fellows has been felt in all the 
moral codes of different times to be harmful, and today when 
we use the word "evil," we have the willing injuring of a 
fellow particularly in mind. 41 

"Good" and "evil" have been used thus far in quite gen- 

89 The Wanderer etc., § 40. 

*° Ibid., §40; cf. Human, etc., §39. 

41 Human, etc., § 96; cf. The Wanderer etc., § 190. In Joyful Science, 
§ 345, Nietzsche appears to question a moral consensus, but only in 
appearance, and in his closing period he reaffirms it. 



124 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

eral senses. But Nietzsche has a keen scent for shades of 
meaning, and he thinks that at times these words have par- 
ticular significations. For instance, to a ruling tribe or class 
"good" has certain associations which are quite different from 
those that it has to a weak and subject population — associa- 
tions of power, self-satisfaction, and pride. "Evil" (schlecht), 
the opposite of "good," they apply to those contrasted with 
themselves whom they look down upon, the weaker, incoherent 
mass whom they have subjected. To this extent "good" and 
"evil" are like high and low, master and slave. "Evil," so 
understood, does not apply to an enemy who is strong — in 
Homer, Trojan and Greek alike are good; "evil" is an epithet 
of contempt. On the other hand, among those who are sub- 
jected and powerless, and whose predominant sentiment is one 
of fear, practically every other being is evil (hose), i.e., capable 
of injuring them — they do not trust one another enough to form 
a community, or more than the rudest kind of one, and this is 
why they easily become subject, or else disappear. These con- 
trasted meanings of good and evil are very imperfectly worked 
out now — we shall come on a fresh and much fuller statement 
in Nietzsche's succeeding period. 42 

I pass over Nietzsche's analysis ("dissection" he sometimes 
calls it) of special moral conceptions, like justice, equality, 
rights, and duties ; he goes on along the same lines in his later 
period and it will be convenient to treat the material together 
in dealing with that period. I also pass over his keen exposure 
of the part which vanity and self-interest play in much that 
passes as moral conduct, though every student of morality 
would do well to attend to it. m 

rv 

Turning now to his own moral views, we find him still with 
a sense of the greatness of a dominating idea or aim, 43 and if 
he does not soar so high and has not so confident a tone as 
before, he is nearer to life and actuality, or, as we might say, 
more human. The eager thought and expectation of something 

" See chap. xix. The above paragraph is based on Human, etc., 
§ 45. The distinction between " hose " and " schhcht " is not at all 
clearly marked here. 

*' 3 The Wanderer etc., § 230. 






ATTITUDE TO MORALS 125 

great and almost superhuman to come, and of a new German 
(or European) culture which should look that way, have more 
or less abated, but he honors the philosopher as before and 
counts as the highest pleasures those of conceiving works of 
art and doing noble deeds — so that in effect the old trinity still 
lingers in his mind. 44 With all his determinism, and perhaps 
quite consistently with it, he has a sense of human power. Not 
only can man know, he can do. Active natures, he says, not so 
much follow the saying, "Know thyself," as feel an inner com- 
mand, ' ' Will a self — and so become one. ' ' 45 We can deal with 
our impulses more or less as a gardener does with his plants, 
encouraging now this one and now that: "Woe to the thinker 
who is not the gardener, hut the soil for his plants!" 46 We 
can strip from our passions their fearful character — it is by 
neglect that they become monsters; he who conquers them is 
like a colonist who has become master of forests and swamps 
and can now turn them to account. 47 "Every day is ill-used 
and a danger for the next in which we have not at least once 
denied ourselves in some way : this gymnastics is indispensable, 
if we wish to keep the joy of being our own master. ' ' 48 Nietz- 
sche is sometimes compared to Callicles in Plato's "Gorgias"; 
he is at least not like him so far as Callicles says, "The tem- 
perate man is a fool ; only in hungering and eating, in thirsting 
and drinking, in having all his desires about him and gratifying 
every possible desire does man live happily." 

Nietzsche holds, indeed, that all men seek personal gratifica- 
tion, but he does not mean by this "self-indulgence," nor does 
he imply that men care for comfort, or luxury, or gain, or 
honor, or even continued existence more than anything else. 
The happinesses of different stages of human development [or 
of different kinds of men] are incomparable and peculiar. 49 
The Greeks preferred power which drew upon itself much evil 
to weakness that experienced only good : the sense of power was 
itself pleasurable to them — better than any utility or good 

44 Werke, X, 482. 

45 Mixed Opinions etc., § 366. 
49 Dawn of Day, §382. 

47 The Wanderer etc., §§37, 53; cf. §65. 

48 Ibid., § 305. 

49 Dawn of Day, § 108; see also the conclusion of Human, etc., § 95. 



126 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

name. 50 And what Nietzsche's own ideal is, where gratification 
lay for him, is suggested in what he says, after remarking on 
the sordid political parties of his day, "Live as higher men, and 
do evermore the deeds of the higher culture. ' ' 51 

While he does not recognize, any more than earlier, the 
practicability of making every one an end in himself, while he 
thinks that we may easily overdo pity, and speaks of the need 
of discrimination and judgment, 52 his feelings of broad human 
sympathy and love are as strong as ever. The cold look which 
superior people have for their servants displeases him. 53 He 
finds it something fearful for a man to have less than three 
hundred Thaler a year, or to have to beg like a child and to 
humble himself. 54 He has even sentiment for the criminal, as 
we have seen — and speaks of our crime against him in that we 
treat him as a scamp (Schuft). At times a wondering sense of 
the worth of man as such comes over him: not only is nature 
too beautiful for us poor mortals, but man is, not merely one 
who is moral, but every man. 55 Really Nietzsche wishes (now as 
earlier) to consider all, and, though in varying ways, to give 
a meaning to every life. 56 This does not imply, however, that 
we must always be directly doing for others. One who makes 
a whole person out of himself, who developes all his peculiar 
individual being, may in the long run go further in contributing 
to the general advantage, than one who gives himself up to 
acts of benevolence and pity. 57 If egoism be taken in this higher 
sense, it may be questioned whether the egoistic is not useful 
in a much higher degree, even to other men, than the unego- 
istic. 58n The individual is thus still regarded in the light of 
a public utility, and so far Nietzsche does not in his own view 
transcend the utilitarian standpoint which he accredits to moral- 
ity in general. 

At the same time we feel that a different standpoint is 

60 Dawn of Day, § 360. 

81 Human, etc., § 480. 

64 The Wanderer etc., §41. 

58 Human, etc., § 64. 

8 « Ibid., § 479. 

"Mixed Opinions etc., §342; cf. The Wanderer otc, §49. 

68 Dawn of Day, § 202. 

81 Human, etc., § 95; cf. Dawn of Day, § 174. 

" Werke, XI, 39, § 77. 



ATTITUDE TO MORALS 127 

shaping itself in his mind, though at first tentatively and ques- 
tioningly. Communities, as we have seen, are the raison d'etre 
of morality — without them and their fixed norms (Sitten), it 
would never have arisen. The individual is looked at as existing 
for the community, as a function or functionary of it — apart 
from it he really means nothing, nothing of importance: such, 
in abstracto, is morality's standpoint. But just here Nietzsche 
finds himself questioning. Is this social [moral] significance all 
that a man has? Has he no properly individual being and 
value? May there not be acts of no advantage to society and 
still well worth while? He has a reflection like the follow- 
ing: There are certain things which we cannot do as members 
of society, though we may as private individuals, e.g., show 
mercy to a breaker of the law ; it is something which endangers 
society — society as such cannot do it or sanction it, though it 
may leave certain favored individuals free to do it (the king 
or executive), and we may all be happy when the privilege is 
exercised, though glad in our private hearts rather than as 
citizens. 59 The idea of a possible significance which is purely 
individual appears still more clearly in the following: "The 
active class of men lack ordinarily the higher type of activity; 
I mean the individual. They are active as officials, business 
men, scholars, i.e., as members of a species, but not as quite 
definite individuals and single men; in this respect they are 
lazy." 60 The paragraph closes: "All men may be classed, now 
as in all times, as slave and free; for whoever does not have 
three-fourths of the day to himself is a slave, whatever else he 
may be — statesman, business man, official, or scholar." We 
have already observed his feeling about society's turning men 
into functionaries to defend it against crime; but if man's 
being is in his social functioning, why should our "higher 
humanity" be hurt, and what is the sense in speaking of "sacri- 
fice"? There is the same implication in a distinction he makes, 
in speaking of factory slavery and organization, between a 
person and a screw — the underlying thought being that a screw' 
is for others' uses, a person for his own. 61 

Indeed Nietzsche once raises a strange question (strange; 

69 The Wanderer etc., § 34. 60 Human, etc., § 283. 

81 Dawn of Day, § 206. 



1 



128 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

that is, to us of today with our prevailing social estimates of 
everything) : Grant that all men exist for social purposes and 
are functions of the social mechanism, what is the purpose of 
the mechanism itself? To quote his words, "Humanity uses 
up regardlessly each single person as fuel for its great ma- 
chines: but for what purpose then are the machines, if all 
single persons are only of use in maintaining them? Machines 
that are ends in themselves — is that the umana commedia?" 62 
To us in these days society is an ultima ratio — if anything can 
be shown to be for the good of society, we are as completely 
satisfied as former ages were to have it shown that anything 
was for the glory of God. The import of Nietzsche's question 
will become clearer later on. 

62 Human, etc., § 585. 



CHAPTER XII 
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS AND FORECASTS 

In no way, perhaps, did Nietzsche come to differ more from 
Schopenhauer than in his sense of the possibility of change — 
whether in the individual or in society generally. What may 
be called the historical view of reality was almost lacking in 
Schopenhauer — owing in part no doubt to his conviction of the 
subjectivity of time. a No thoroughgoing Kantian, I may say, 
can believe in the final reality of an historical process. It is 
possible that Nietzsche's vivid sense of his own changes had 
something to do with the formal relinquishment of his early 
subjectivism as to time, which we shall come upon later on. b 



In any case the area of possible change for men and society 
is now large to him. Disillusioned about the near advent of 
a new tragic culture, he is not without compensatory thoughts. 
Is it not possible, he asks, to remove some evils rather than 
merely try to turn them into subjects of art, or to find consola- 
tion for them in religion ? 1 The ancients strove to forget the 
sufferings of existence, or else to make them agreeable through 
art — they worked palliatively ; we today wish to work prophy- 
lactically and attack the causes of suffering. 2 "Artists glorify 
continually — they do nothing else," he somewhat impatiently 
observes. 3 He thinks that art is a resource for moments and 
becomes dangerous when it sets up for more — a halt should be 
called to its fanatical pretensions. 4 With a touch of irony, he 
notes that removing evil may make it hard for the tragic poets, 
whose stock of material would so far diminish, and harder still 
for the priests, whose main business hitherto has been to nar- 
cotize ; but both classes, he thinks, belong to the non-progressive 

1 Human, etc., § 108. 

2 Mixed Opinions etc., § 187. 
8 Joyful Science, § 85. 

4 So Werke (1st ed.), XI, §347, as cited by Riehl, op. cit., p. 153. 
Human, etc., § 148, is to the same effect. 

129 



130 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

forces of society. 5 Progress is doubted by artists, and by meta- 
physical philosophers like Schopenhauer, but the very fact that 
we are now passing out of the tropical zone of culture with its 
violent contrasts and glowing colors, in which artists live, into 
the cooler, clearer, temperate zone of science, seems to him an 
instance of progress. 6 He questions indeed the necessity of 
progress and thinks that the days of the unconscious sort may 
be over; all the same, he urges that we might now consciously 
strive for a new culture, might create better conditions for the 
rise of human beings, for their nourishment, training, and 
instruction, might undertake an economic administration of the 
earth as a whole, measuring and distributing the forces of men 
wisely to this end — and this would surely be progress and would 
itself destroy the old mistrust of progress. 7 Nietzsche really 
began, as we have seen, with a general hope of this character; 
the difference is now that he has been somewhat chastened and 
no longer looks for appreciable help from art, and that he 
emphasizes certain practically necessary measures — something 
which preoccupation with art is liable to make one neglect. At 
the same time he continues to be thinker rather than himself 
reformer — believing, like Socrates, that "a private life, not a 
public one," is alone suitable to him, and not having any too 
high idea of existing states and of the kind of political activity 
they make necessary anyway. 8 

As regards the economic structure of society, there is no 
change from the view that slavery is necessary. A higher cul- 
ture can arise only where there are the two castes of those who 
labor and those possessed of leisure, or, as he sometimes puts 
it, of compulsory labor and free labor. The way in which 
happiness (Gliick) is distributed is not vital when the produc- 
tion of a higher culture is at stake ; in any case it is those with 
leisure, to whom come the greater tasks, who have less ease in 
existence, who suffer more. If only there might be exchange 
between the castes, so that worn-out stocks and individuals in 
the upper could descend into the lower, and freer men among 
the lower could rise to the higher, a state would be reached, 

5 Human, etc., § 108; cf. §§ 147, 148, 159. 
8 Ibid., § 108. 

7 Mixed Opinions etc., § 187. 

8 Cf. The Wanderer etc., § 232; Dawn of Day, § 179. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 131 

beyond which only indefinite wishes are possible. 9 Something 
of this sort was, I think, suggested by Huxley — and it shows 
that it was not a caste system, in the sense of one with impass- 
able barriers, that Nietzsche had in mind. More or less of this 
exchange — at least in the downward direction — takes place in 
caste societies as matter of fact. According to Professor 
Sumner, a Plantagenet was a butcher in a suburb of London 
a few years ago, and representatives of the great mediaeval 
families may now be found as small farmers, farm laborers, or 
tramps in England (Hardy using a fact of this kind in Tess 
of the D'Urbervilles). 10 If things like this could happen in 
both directions and with reasonable promptness and in accord- 
ance with a recognized social law, Nietzsche 's somewhat shadowy 
idea would be realized — of course, changes in the laws of inheri- 
tance would be necessary. 

As to property (Besitz), Nietzsche thinks that only those 
with mind should have it; otherwise it is an element of danger 
in a community. He who does not know how to use the free 
time which its possession gives strives for more — it is his way 
of diverting himself, of fighting boredom; and so from mod- 
erate possessions, which would suffice an intellectual man, 
comes wealth proper — a shining consequence of the lack of 
independence and intellectual poverty in one who amasses it, 
and at the same time something that excites the envy of the 
poor and uneducated, and prepares the way for a social revolu- 
tion. 11 Only up to a certain point does property serve its pur- 
pose of making one more independent and free; beyond that, 
property becomes the master and the owner a slave. 12 Nietzsche 
sometimes draws almost a contemptuous picture of mere riches, 
his attitude being only softened by the reflection that rich men 
are half -ashamed of themselves 13 [a type with which we do not 
appear to be acquainted in America]. He makes sport of the 
dinners of the rich, 14 gives instances of how the love of money 
makes one unscrupulous, 15 notes the unhappy effect of American 

9 Human, etc., § 439. 

10 W. G. Sumner, Folkways, p. 166. 

11 Mixed Opinions etc., § 310. 

12 Ibid., §317. 

13 The Wanderer etc., § 209; Dawn of Day, § 186. 

14 Dawn of Day, § 203. 
16 Ibid., § 204. 



132 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

gold-hunger on Europe in destroying the true estimate of 
leisure, in banishing ceremony from social intercourse, in making 
letter-writing the style-less, mindless thing it has come to be, 
in reducing pleasure to what overworked slaves have to have 
to recreate and amuse them — we all want to be "busy," and 
are ashamed of what makes for the ease and grace and dignity 
of life. 16 

This does not mean that Nietzsche fails to appreciate what 
industry and commerce are doing for our time — he even says 
that it is the commercial class who keep us from falling back 
into barbarism (having in mind telegraphs, geographical ex- 
plorations, industrial inventions, etc.). 17 It is not commerce, 
but the motives behind it, the methods it too often pursues, that 
lead to reflections like those cited. Men are after money, and 
do almost anything for a rich return. 18 He finds exchange 
honorable and just, when each party is guided by the thought 
of what an article is worth (taking into account a variety of 
factors that determine worth) ; but when either is influenced 
by the thought of the needs of the other, he is only a refined 
robber and extortioner. 19 He notes that the merchant and the 
pirate were for a long time one and the same person, bartering 
being resorted to when force was not expedient; and current 
business morality now is really only a refinement of pirate 
morality — the maxim being to buy as cheaply and sell as dearly 
as possible. 20 It is accordingly the mark of the higher type of 
man not to be at home in trade. For a teacher, an official, an 
artist to sell his ability for the highest price, or to practise 
usury with it, is to drop to the shop-keeper's level. 21 A principal 
cause of bad conditions in Germany is, that there are far too 
many living off trade and wishing to live well there — hence 
reducing prices to the utmost limit to producers, raising them 
to the utmost limit to consumers, and drawing profit from the 
greatest possible injury to both. 22 

16 Ibid., §§203-4; Joyful Science, §329. Cf. the characterization of 
modern " holidays," Dawn of Day, § 178. 

17 WerJce, XI, 139, §441. 

18 Joyful Science, § 42. 

19 The Wanderer etc., §25; cf. Dawn of Day, §175. 

20 The Wanderer etc., § 22. 

21 Dawn of Day, § 308. 

22 The Wanderer etc., § 282. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 133 

Nietzsche's attitude to the laborer, whether we agree with 
it or not, cannot be called unsympathetic. We today, in con- 
trast with the ancient world, like to exalt labor, but he does not 
think that we treat the laborer much better, and he raises the 
question whether our talk has not some cynicism in it, or at 
least tartuferie. 230 He prefers plain speaking, and uses such 
terms as slavery, and in particular factory-slavery, much as the 
socialists do. 24 He has a sense of the unhappy effect of the 
modern machine upon the workers. It depersonalizes labor, 
strips it of its bit of humanity, turns men into machines. Al- 
though it liberates a vast amount of energy, it gives no impulse 
to higher development, to doing better work, to becoming more 
artistic; it shows how masses may co-operate by each one doing 
one thing, and so becomes a pattern for party organization and 
the conduct of war — its most general effect is to teach the uses 
of centralization. 25 Once he suggests certain remedies against 
what is injurious in machine-labor — first, frequent interchange 
of labor among those working at a machine or at different ma- 
chines; second, getting a comprehension of the total structure 
of the machine, including knowledge of its defects and the 
possibilities of improving it; he finds suggestive the example 
of a democratic state, which changes its officials often. 26 As to 
the deserts of labor, he gives up the attempt to estimate them — 
indeed, desert in general is for him an illusory conception, as 
we have already seen; all the same he finds considerations of 
utility in order, and believes that justice as a highly refined 
utility may well come into play. By this he means a long-range 
view of consequences, one which takes account not of a mo- 
mentary situation merely, but of the future as well, hence of 
the well-being of the laborer, his contentment in body and mind, 
so that he and his children may work well for coming genera- 
tions. From this point of view the exploitation of the laborer 
is a stupidity, a robbery at the expense of the future, an im- 
periling of society. Nietzsche thinks that we have now almost 

28 Dawn of Day, §173; cf. Joyful Science, §§188, 329, which con- 
tinue the tone of Werke, IX, 145-51. On the ancient view, see also 
Sumner, op. cit., pp. 160-2. 

24 Dawn of Day, § 206. 

25 The Wanderer etc., §§ 288, 220, 218. 
28 Werke, XI, 141, § 449. 



134 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

come to a state of war in society; at least the costs of main- 
taining peace are becoming enormous, the folly of the exploiting 
classes being so great and so persistent. 27 He deems a social 
revolution not unlikely. 28 

The educated classes in general are not without responsibility 
for the situation. If we complain of lack of discipline among 
the masses, the reproach falls back heavily on them ; the masses 
are just as good and just as bad as the educated are ; they set 
the tone, and elevate and corrupt the mass as they elevate or 
corrupt themselves. 29 A part of the trouble, too, lies in the lack 
of personal relation between employers and employed. We pay 
any one we know and respect, who does us a service, whether 
he be physician, artist, or hand-worker, as high as we can, 
perhaps beyond our means; but an unknown person we pay as 
little as practicable — the human element or relation disappears. 30 
Manners, breeding are also a factor. It is strange, Nietzsche 
says, that subjection to powerful, fear-inspiring, even frightful 
persons, to tyrants and military commanders, is not so painfully 
felt, as subjection to unknown and uninteresting persons such 
as the great men of industry are: the laborer sees in his em- 
ployer usually only a cunning dog of a man, who drains him 
and speculates on his needs, and whose name, shape, and repu- 
tation are utterly indifferent to him. Manufacturers and great 
leaders of business have apparently lacked quite too much thus 
far all those forms and signs of a higher race, which first make 
persons interesting; had there been the distinction of the born 
noble in their look and bearing, perhaps socialism would never 
have developed among the masses. For these at bottom are 
ready for any kind of slavery, provided that the man who stands 
over them continually legitimates himself as one born to com- 
mand — by distinction of manner! The commonest man feels 
that such distinction is not to be improvised and that in it he 
honors the fruit of a long past — but the absence of it and the 
notorious manufacturer-vulgarity with red fat hands bring 
him to the thought that only accident and luck have elevated 
one man above another — and so he says to himself, "Let us try 
accident and luck! We will throw the dice!" — and socialism 

27 The Wanderer etc., § 286. 2 " Ibid., XI, 377, § 572. 

28 Werke, XI, 369, § 559. 30 The Wanderer etc., § 283. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 135 

begins. 31 d And yet Nietzsche does not think it necessary that 
the workers shall always live as they live now. Dipping into 
the future, one of the things he conceives possible is that eco- 
nomic relations might be so ordered that there would be no 
longer the desperate anxiety about living and dying which 
prevails at present. 32 This does not mean, however, really rising 
out of slavery. If the workers are bent on that, they must be ready 
to leave existing civilization, become emigrants, colonists, incur 
risks of want and danger. He is evidently not without admira- 
tion for those who should take so heroic a step, and is ironical 
about those who are willing to remain screws, if they can only 
be better paid, i.e., who put a price upon their personality — 
ironical too about those who think, socialist fashion, that if 
they can only be screws in the great machine called the state, 
all will change, and their slavery become a virtue. "Poor, 
happy, and independent! this is all possible at the same time; 
poor, happy, and slave! — this also is possible" — though there 
can be little doubt which of the possibilities Nietzsche ranks 
higher. 33 

ii 

Turning now to the political field, we find Nietzsche inclined 
to look at democracy as a fait accompli, and disposed to turn 
it to the best possible account. The "enlightenment" (Auf- 
klarung) of the eighteenth century was in itself a good, and if 
the changes naturally ensuing had been slow, if customs and 
institutions had been gradually modified, all would have been 
well. But with the French Revolution the movement took a 
violent turn, and trying to be sudden and complete the Revolu- 
tion became a pathetie and bloody piece of quackery. 346 
Democracy, however, is not his ideal. He desires a rule of the 
intelligent rather than of the many, and once ventures to 
suggest a way for getting them. It would be really a process 
of self-selection, or rather mutual-selection. First, the honest 
and trustworthy of a country, who are at the same time in 

31 Joyful Science, §40. 
82 Werke, XI, 377, § 572. 

33 Dawn of Day, §206. 

34 The Wanderer etc., § 22; Dawn of Day, § 534; cf. Werke, XI, 369, 
§559. 



136 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

some respect masters and experts, would segregate themselves, 
by a process of scenting one another out and reciprocal recog- 
nition ; and then from among these, such as are of the first rank 
in each special line would select themselves, again by reciprocal 
recognition and guarantees. These last would constitute the 
legislative body, and thus the highest grade of specialized ability 
would be brought to bear on the making of laws, each branch 
of specialists deciding on the questions in their province, the rest 
being honorable and decent enough to leave things in their hands. 
In this way laws would be strictly the outcome of the intelli- 
gence of the most intelligent. Now parties decide things, and 
every time that a vote is taken there must be hundreds of bad 
consciences — so many are ill-instructed, or incapable of judging, 
and simply follow others or are dragged along. Nothing lowers 
the dignity of a new law so much as the blush of dishonesty 
to which every party vote compels. Nietzsche is aware that it 
is easy to propose and hard to carry out such a scheme, but he 
has the hope that sometime faith in the utility of science and of 
men who know will arise in the most unwilling and replace the 
present faith in numbers. 35 Besides, he argues that the system 
of having everybody vote depends logically on everybody's 
wanting to vote, the will of a majority not being sufficient to 
constitute a universal rule, and he doubts whether all do want 
to vote now, since so many do not use the privilege they have. 36 
But with all his argumentation he accepts the situation as he 
finds it, and he realizes the ironical side of it for the old ruling 
classes. 37 ''The poor reigning princes! All their rights are 
turning themselves now unexpectedly into claims, and all these 
claims soon sound like pretensions !" 38 King and emperor are 
becoming almost ciphers in ordinary times — symbols, ornaments, 
beautiful superfluities; though on this account they cling the 
more tenaciously to their dignity as war-lords — and need wars 
on occasion, i.e., exceptional circumstances in which the demo- 
cratic pressure is interrupted. 39 

88 Mixed Opinions etc., § 318. 
80 The Wanderer etc., § 276. 

87 He comes nearest to positive sympathy with democracy In Human, 
etc., § 450. 

88 Joyful Science, § 176. 

80 The Wanderer etc., §281. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 137 

Nietzsche even finds advantages in the new regime, in which 
government does not so much rule the people as become their 
organ. ' ' Democratic institutions are quarantine stations against 
the old pest of tyrannical ambitions — as such, very useful and 
very tedious. ' ' 40 The democratizing of Europe now going on 
seems to him a link in the chain of those immense prophylactic 
measures, characteristic of the new time, by which we are mark- 
ing ourselves off against the Middle Ages. At last we are to 
get a sure foundation, on which the future can build. We shall 
make it impossible for fruitful fields of culture to be destroyed 
in a night by wild and senseless mountain floods, shall put up 
dams and walls against barbarians, against pestilences, against 
whatever would subject the bodies or the minds of men. It is 
crude, rough work at the start, but it will prepare the way for 
something higher and more spiritual to come — as the gardener 
has first to protect his field, and then proceeds to plant. Yes, 
Nietzsche will not judge the workers for democracy too harshly, 
if for the time being they consider democracy an end, instead 
of a means. 41 What democracy wants to do is to create and 
guarantee independence for as many as possible — independence 
of thought, of manner of life, and of occupation. To this end, 
however, it must make restrictions — must deny the right to vote 
on the one hand to the propertyless, on the other to the really 
rich. These are the two unpermissible classes in the community, 
for whose removal democracy must continually labor, the one 
because they are without independence, the other because 
they threaten it; they and the party system are the three 
great foes of independence. He is aware that democracy 
of this character belongs to the future; for present-day democ- 
racy differs from older forms of government simply in that it 
drives with new horses — the streets are the old ones, and the 
vehicles the old ones too. 42 With similar concern for inde- 
pendence, Nietzsche hopes that the new rulers will not try to 
rule everywhere, or make standards convenient to the majority 
binding on all. Some scattering individuals should be allowed 
to hold aloof from politics, if they will. They should also be 
forgiven if they do not take the happiness of the many as so 
supremely important, and become ironical now and then ; their 

*°Ibid., §289. "Ibid., §275. * 2 Ibid., §293. 



138 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

earnestness is in other directions, their ideas of happiness are 
peculiar, their aim is not one that every hand with five fingers 
can grasp. Still further, they should be allowed on occasion to 
break their solitude by speaking to one another (they will be 
somewhat like men lost in the woods) and encouraging one 
another, even if they say some things which jar on ears for 
which they were not intended. 43 Despite all this, Nietzsche 
thinks it perfectly natural and legitimate that the many should 
act with a view to their own interests ; it is to be expected that, 
through the great parliamentary majorities they are likely to 
obtain, they will attack by progressive taxes the capitalistic, 
commercial, and speculating classes. Indeed in this way they 
may gradually bring about a condition of things between the 
extremes of poverty and wealth, in which socialism will be 
forgotten. 44 f 

in 
Socialism is a combined economic and political problem, and 
it may be well to note Nietzsche's views at this point in some 
detail. Anarchists he looks upon as backward and untamed 
people who will rule hard, if they get the upper hand — they 
enjoy the sense of power too much; but for socialists he has a 
certain limited sympathy — he speaks of them as one of the signs 
of the "coming century." 45 He practically takes the socialist 
movement as a "rising of those oppressed and held down for 
centuries against their oppressors." The problem it presents 
to us practically is not one of right, "how far should we yield 
to its demands," but one of power, "how far can we utilize 
them" — just as with a force of nature, steam, for example, 
which may either be brought into the service of man or may 
destroy him. To solve the problem, we must know how strong 
socialism is, and in what modified form it might be used as a 
lever in the present play of political forces; in certain con- 
tingencies, it might be a duty to do everything to strengthen 
it. 46 It will first win rights, when war threatens between the 
old forces and the new, and prudent calculation on both sides 
creates the desire for a compact or agreement — for compacts 

49 Human, etc., §438. 

44 The Wanderer etc., § 292. 

43 Dawn of Day, § 184; Werke, XI, 376, § 571. 

40 Human, etc., §446. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 139 

are the source of all rights [Nietzsche remarks that up to the 
time of his writing — 1877 apparently — there had been no war 
or compacts, hence there were no rights or " ought" in the 
matter]. 47 The movement is, of course, a movement of those 
interested, but Nietzsche recognizes that it may also be es- 
poused by persons from other classes animated simply by senti- 
ments of justice and ready to practise it at their own cost — 
high-minded (if not just very discerning) representatives of 
the ruling class might act in this way. 48 

For his own part he admits the socialist contention that the 
present distribution of property is the consequence of number- 
less injustices and violences; he simply adds that this is only 
one instance, the old culture in general being built on a basis of 
force, slavery, deception, and error. He thinks that the unjust 
disposition lurks everywhere, in the propertyless as well as 
propertied, and that the needful thing is not violences, but 
the gradual alteration of men's minds, justice becoming greater 
and violent instincts weaker on all sides. 49 He considers the 
remedies of an equal division of property and common owner- 
ship, and finds them both impracticable. Instead he urges that 
avenues to small ownership should be kept wide open, and that 
the acquisition of wealth suddenly and without effort should be 
prevented. In particular should all branches of transportation 
and trade which are favorable to the amassing of great wealth — 
he instances especially banking (Geldhandel) — be taken out of 
private hands : '°° it comes pretty near to practical socialism.* 
He even meets by an illuminating explanation an objection 
often made to socialism, namely, that it overlooks the matter- 
of-fact inequalities between men. It does so, he says, much as 
Christianity overlooks differences in human sinfulness — they 
are too slight to be taken into account: in the total reckoning 
all are sinful and need salvation. So socialism regards the 
common nature and powers and needs of men as so much more 
important than the respects in which they differ, that it de- 
liberately puts the latter to one side — and in the resolve to 
ignore differences lies an inspiring force. 51 

And yet on the whole Nietzsche is hostile to socialism. The 

47 Ibid., § 446. B0 The Wanderer etc., § 285. 

48 Ibid., §451. 'MVerfce, XI, 141, §448. 

49 Ibid., §452. 



140 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

only means of counteracting it which the well-to-do have in 
their power is, not to provoke it, to live temperately and 
frugally, to avoid all luxurious display and support the state 
instead of opposing it when it lays taxes on superfluities and 
luxuries. If they lack the will to do this, the only difference 
remaining between them and the socialists is that they possess 
and the socialists want to — the aims are the same. He gives 
a scathing description of the lives and pleasures of the present 
possessing class. 52 The unhappy thing is that the workers are 
now bent on aping them, are becoming "fellow-conspirators 
in the present folly of nations, who want before everything else 
to produce as much and to become as rich as possible. ' ' K Nietz- 
sche 's ideals are elsewhere, and he does not think too much 
comfort and wealth and security good for man. If the socialists 
and worshipers of the state had their way, they might with 
their measures for making life happy and secure bring Europe 
to Chinese conditions and a Chinese "happiness," with dis- 
satisfaction on any great scale and capacity for transformation 
gone. 54 Ideals of security and comfort are pre-eminently the 
mark of a commercial age, which wants to have everything easy 
for trade and the state a sort of arm-chair. 55 He wishes, indeed, 
a certain measure of comfort and security for the working 
class, but to make this an absolute ideal, to leave no free, wild 
spaces in society where risk and danger exist — this, he feels, 
would be to banish the conditions under which great men and 
great enterprises arise. 56 To him socialism seems practically 
identical with a despotic state, in which individuals with indi- 
vidual instincts and aims appear unjustifiable luxuries, and all 
are turned into organs of the community — a conception the 
general form of which we saw him questioning at the end of 
the last chapter. Minor criticism of socialism I pass over. h 
The greatest benefit coming from it is, he thinks, the stimulus 
it gives — it entertains men and brings to the lowest strata a 
species of practico-philosophical discussion ; so far it is a spring 

82 Mixed Opinions etc., §§ 304, 310. 

53 Dawn of Day, § 206. 

54 Joyful Science, § 24. 

50 Dawn of Day, § 174; Werke, XI, 368, §557. 

86 So I interpret the second of the eight reflections on socialism in 
Werke, XI, 142-4; cf. Human, etc., §235. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 141 

of power to the mind. 57 But from the theory itself he turns 
away, and while admitting a social revolution to be not un- 
likely, he thinks that its result will be less than is expected, 
since man can do so very much less than he wills (as is shown 
by the French Revolution). 58 He is thus really at home no- 
where. While the old aristocratic order is dead, the new com- 
mercial order is vulgar and tame, nor does the socialist order 
which may be coming attract him either. He says in sub- 
stance, "We [he and his kind] are emigres, observers of the ( 
time, — we wish only to become free of it and understand it, like 
an eagle flying over it; we have no desire to be citizens or 
politicians or property-owners, we only want the greatest pos- 
sible independence; we will be deadly enemies of those of our 
contemporaries who take refuge in lying and wish reaction; 
our interest is in individuals and educating them — perhaps 
humanity will some day have need of them, when the general 
intoxication of anarchy is past. ' ' 59 

IV 

Yet, ill-moored as he is to the present time and standing 
for nothing actual, he has certain expectations — at least, there 
are better possibilities for the future, to which he more than 
once recurs. 

As for politics, he would like to see it ordered so that mod- 
erate intellects might meet its demands, and we should not all 
have to be continually concerned with it. It is not so great 
a matter as we sometimes think. We [Germans] rank it so 
high, because we are deficient in the instincts that make it in 
the normal man something natural and matter-of-course — we 
need incitement. 60 He can even imagine an ultimate disap- 
pearance of the state — as the old unities of the tribe and the 
family have disappeared. Its functions might be taken over by 
private individ ials and associations. He admits that it is a 
different thing to work for such an end : it would be presumptu- 
ous and show little knowledge of history to break up old soil, 

57 Werke, XI, 144. 

58 Ibid., XI, 369, §559. Cf. the allusion to the socialist "rat- 
catchers" and the "mad hopes" they excite (Dawn of Day, §206). 

69 Werke XI, 375, § 570. 

eo Ibid., c ^ ^ 482. 



142 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

till new seeds are at hand, and he hopes that the state will last 
yet a good while, and that destructive attacks on it by hasty, 
half-educated people will be averted. 61 The reason for his rela- 
tively low estimate of it is, on the one hand, that the ends it 
serves (security and comfort) are lesser ends in life, and, on 
the other, that it none the less wishes to call the highest talents 
to its aid. Mind ought to be free for other things. "Our age 
that talks so much of economy is a spendthrift : it wastes what 
is most precious, mind. " 62 It is the business people particu- 
larly who want the state, and it is they, with their philosophy, 
who are ruling the world now — artists, scholars, even religion 
following in their train. 63 * 

He gives much attention to war — a state-phenomenon. He 
knows its uses in the past, is far from absolutely condemning it, 
admits that it may have uses in the future — there is one apho- 
rism with the extravagant title, "War Indispensable." 64 It is 
a remedy, he thinks, for peoples growing languid and miserable 
— a remedy, that is, supposing that they really want to live — a 
sort of brutal cure. 65 It is a return to barbarism, but also to 
barbaric strength, a kind of hibernating time for culture, out 
of which one issues stronger both for good and for evil. 66 It 
may also be a good to a commercialized people, too fond of 
security and ease. 67 On the other hand, a people living full and 
strong has no need of war. 68 Its effect is to make the victors 
stupid and the vanquished malicious. 69 The military system 
not only involves enormous expense, but, what is worse, it takes 
the strongest, most capable men in extraordinary numbers away 
from their proper occupations, to make them soldiers. 70 After 
drawing a vivid detailed picture of the various inequities and 
stupidities in military life, he sets down the modern military 
system as an anachronism, a survival, having for the wheels of 
present-day society only the value of a drag ior brake (i.e., in 

61 Human, etc., § 472. 

62 Ibid., §481; The Wanderer etc., §232; Dawn of Day, §179. 
"Werke, XI, 367-9. 

64 Human, etc., § 477. 

65 The Wanderer etc., § 187. 

66 Human, etc., §444; cf. 463. 
87 Werlce, XI, 369, § 558. 

68 The Wanderer etc., § 187. 
• 9 Human, etc., § 444. 
"Ibid., §481; cf. §442. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 143 

case a nation is going up or down too fast). 71 He even suggests 
that a strong victorious people might some day disarm. "Per- 
haps a great day is coming, when a people distinguished by 
wars and victories and the highest development of military 
organization and intelligence, accustomed too to bring the 
heaviest sacrifices to these objects, will voluntarily proclaim, 
'We break the sword' — and allow its whole military system 
down to the last foundations to fall in ruins. To disarm whilst 
most capable of arms, from an elevation of sentiment — that is 
the way to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition 
for peace; while the so-called armed peace, such as we find in 
all lands now, rests on warlikeness of disposition, which trusts 
neither itself nor its neighbor, and half from hate, half from 
fear, refuses to lay its weapons down. Better perish than hate 
and fear, and twice better perish than make oneself hated and 
feared — this must some day be the supreme maxim of every 
individual political society. ' ' 72 

Yes, Nietzsche goes still further. He is aware that, as I 
have said, war is a state-phenomenon, and that the continued 
possibility of it in Europe is bound up with the system of sep- 
arate states which exist there, 73 and he deliberately sets himself 
against the nationalist spirit (or spirits), which has grown ever 
stronger since the reaction against Napoleon, and calls for a 
federation of European peoples, a "united Europe." It is 
interesting to note that his first thought of such a consumma- 
tion was as a result of the democratizing process now so gen- 
erally going on. He makes a notable forecast along this line, 
which I may summarize as follows: The practical outcome of 
the spreading democratic tendency will be a European federa- 
tion of peoples. Each people will be like a canton with its own 
separate rights. Boundaries between cantons will be determined 
largely by geographical considerations. The historical mem- 
ories of the various peoples will not be taken greatly into 
account, for the innovating and experimental spirit of democ- 
racy tends to uproot sentiments of this description ; while 
corrections of boundaries that may be necessary will be carried 
out so as to serve the interests of the large cantons and of the 
whole federation, they will not be in deference to recollections 
71 The Wanderer etc., § 279. 72 Ibid., § 284. 7S Cf. Human, etc., § 615. 



144 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

of any hoary past. To find suitable points of view for the 
corrections will be the task of future diplomats, who will need 
to be at once adepts in the history of culture, agriculturists, 
and trade experts, and they will have not armies, but reasons 
and practical utilities to back them. 74 Some breaks with the 
past being inevitable, there will be plaints for lost national 
traits (in dress, customs, legal conceptions, dialects, forms of 
poetry), but we must not lend too much ear to them. It is the 
price that has to be paid for rising to the super-national, to 
universal goals of mankind, yes to a real knowledge and com- 
prehension and enjoyment of other pasts than one's own (des 
nicht Einheimischen) — in a word, for ceasing to be barbarian. 75 
Crude patriotism, such as the Romans had, is now, when quite 
other and higher tasks than patria and honor await us, either a 
dishonest thing or else a sign of arrested development (Zuruck- 
gebliebenheit) , 76 National differences are, much more than is 
commonly realized, differences in stages of culture, not anything 
permanent, so that there is little obligation to argue from 
national character for one who is trying to recreate convictions, 
i.e., to elevate culture. If, for example, one thinks of all that 
has been German, the theoretic question, What is German? gets 
at once the corrected shape, "What is German now?" — and 
every good German will answer it practically just by over- 
coming some of his German qualities. When a people goes 
forward and grows, it breaks the girdle that gave it hitherto 
its national appearance; if it stays as it was, becomes stunted, 
a new girdle fastens itself around its soul — the ever hardening 
crust becomes as it were a prison, whose walls ever grow. Has 
then a people very much that is fixed, it is a proof that it is 
ready to petrify and become a monument — as was the case at 
a certain point of time with ancient Egypt. "Hence he who 
wishes well to the Germans will for his part see to it, that he 
ever more and more grows out beyond what is German. Turning 
to the un-German has ever been the distinguishing mark of the 
strong (Tuchtigen) among us." Nietzsche entitles this para- 
graph " To be a good German means to un-Germanize oneself. ' ' 77 

74 The Wanderer etc., § 292. 

75 Werke, XI, 133-4, § 423. 

76 Human, etc., § 442. 

71 Mixed Opinions etc., §323; cf. Werke, XIII, 337, §836. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 145 

He thinks that already modern tendencies — commerce and indus- 
try, the interchange of books and letters, the common features 
in all higher culture, the easy changing of abode — are weaken- 
ing nations and tending in the direction of a European man. 3 ' 
Not the interest of the many, as is often said, but above all the 
interests of certain princely dynasties, and then of certain 
commercial and social classes, push in the nationalist direction. 78 
Taking this larger view, Nietzsche finds the Catholic church 
suggestive, i.e., the catholicity of it, particularly when it was a 
sovereign and super-national power in the Middle Ages and 
made states and nations look petty in comparison ! The church 
met fictitious needs, it is true, but some day there may be 
equally universal institutes to meet man's real needs. 79 He 
boldly anticipates "the united states of Europe," holding that 
while the uniting of the various German governments in one 
state was a "great idea," this is a still "greater idea." 80 He 
even broaches the idea of an international ministry of educa- 
tion, which should consider the intellectual welfare of the entire 
human race, independently of national interests. 81 Europe has 
a lofty dignity, in his eyes: its task, once united, will be to 
guide and watch over the development of the entire earth. 82 
In this connection an extraordinary suggestion is thrown out 
that a medical geography of the globe be made, so that, as a 
physician sends his patients to this and that climate or par- 
ticular environment for the cure of their varying ailments, so 
ailing peoples and families may be gradually taken to zones 
and circumstances favorable to them till their infirmities are 
overcome — the whole earth becoming thus in time a set of 
health-stations. 83 One may skeptically ask who is to be the 
physician for so great a task, and to this Nietzsche gives no 
formal answer, but may be presumed to have in mind some 
such organization of the accumulated science and wisdom of 
mankind as a "united Europe" might effect. Continuing these 
large prospects, he speaks of an "economy of the earth," of 
letting poorer races die out and training better ones, of one 
language — in general, of entirely new conditions for human 

78 Human, etc., §475. 81 Ibid., XI, 147-8, §460. 

79 Ibid., §476. 82 The Wanderer etc., §87. 
eo Werke, XI, 138, §439. ** Ibid., §188. 



146 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

development, particularly for the development of beings of a 
higher type. 81 He thinks that by the conquest of nature more 
force may be won than is actually needed, and then something 
of the luxurious might come among men, of which we have 
no idea now; great projects would be feasible of which we do 
not dream. "Aerial navigation alone throws all our old cul- 
tural conceptions aside" [he might have added, "undersea 
navigation," had he lived now]. Instead of our usual works 
of art, we might try to beautify nature on a great scale by 
means of labor extending over centuries — for example, bring 
to perfection suggestions and motives of beauty in the Alps. 
We might have an architecture, in which we should build for 
eternity, as the Romans did. We might utilize the backward 
peoples of Asia, Africa, and elsewhere as laborers. 85 Cyclopic 
work has been done by other forces in the past; the day of 
science is to come. 86 k 

For progress Nietzsche finds an advantage in the free- 
thinking habits of mind which have arisen in recent times 
(though he distinguishes free-thinking from what is popularly 
known as "free-thought"). Prehistoric ages were determined 
during immeasurable stretches of time by custom, nothing hap- 
pening ; in the historic period the matter of moment has always 
been some departure from custom, some disagreement of 
opinion: it is free action of the mind (die Freigeisterei) that 
makes history. 87 There is corresponding significance in the dis- 
solution of old religious traditions now going on. We are ready 
to experiment, to take things into our own hands. Our courage 
rises as we have need of it, and if we fail or err, we believe 
that it is our own affair — "God," as one to whom we are 
accountable for mistakes, and "immortal souls," with which 
we are to pay penalties, have disappeared. 88 And yet, Nietzsche 
urges, we should be at our work betimes. The aim he proposes 
few will question the greatness of — he speaks of it as an 
"ecumenical" one, embracing the whole inhabited globe; 89 he 

84 Werke, XI, 139, §441. 
80 Ibid., XI, 376-7, § 572. 
80 Joyful Science, §7. 

87 Werke, XI, 138, § 440. 

88 Cf. Mixed Opinions etc., § 179; Dawn of Day, §501. 

89 Mixed Opinions etc., § 179. Cf. the striking paragraph on mankind 
as a tree which is to overshadow the earth, The Wanderer etc., § 189. 



SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 147 

reminds us, however, that while time is long, propitious time is 
not necessarily so. We cannot assume that mankind will always 
be able to go on in the higher direction. Things do not improve 
by instinct or any divine destiny. There may be movement 
down as well as up, and mankind at the end of its career may 
be on a lower level than it is now. With the downfall of Roman 
culture and the spread of Christianity, man became increasingly 
unsightly within the Empire; and human-kind in general, as 
it has come up from the ape, may at last go down to it. 90 The 
race may be nearer the heights possible to it in the middle of its 
journey than at the close — the end of a melody is not its goal, 
the end of a man's life (above all when it is in weakness) is 
not its goal. 91 Therefore let us compass the utmost possible 
now — the chance may not come again. 

Nietzsche has certain anticipations even in the religious field 
— if religion may be taken broadly to cover any kind of a cultus 
of ideal things. "A Vision" is the title of one aphorism, which 
reads as follows: "Lectures and hours for meditation set apart 
for adults, mature and maturest, and these daily, uncompulsory, 
but visited by every one from force of custom; churches, as 
the places worthiest and richest in memories, to be used for this 
purpose; almost daily festivals in honor of the attained or 
attainable dignity of human reason; a new and fuller blossom- 
ing of the ideal of the teacher, in which clergyman, artist, 
physician, scholar, and wise man, blend in one . . . this is my 
vision, which ever comes back to me, and about which I firmly 
believe that it has lifted a corner of the future's veil." 92 He 
expresses the desire for a new style of architecture which shall 
more worthily, more fittingly express the serious ideas of men 
today — still, ample spaces, where no sound of traffic is heard 
and a finer decency even forbids praying aloud to the priest, 
where one can think and for a few moments be by oneself. 93 
But the religious suggestions of Nietzsche I must practically 
leave out of account in the present volume. 94 

90 Human, etc., § 247. 

91 Ibid., §234; The Wanderer etc., §204; Dawn of Day, §349. 
62 Mixed Opinions etc., § 180. 

88 Joyful Science, § 280. 

8 *As to a "religion of the future," see Werhe, XI, 327, §439; 373, 
§ 569; 376, § 571; Dawn of Day, §§ 96, 164. 



THIRD PERIOD 



CHAPTER XIII 



GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD, AND VIEW OF 

THE WORLD 



In the spring of 1879 Nietzsche resigned his professorship at 
Basel. Already — some three years earlier — he had been 
obliged to give up his work at the Padagogium there. There 
were intervals of exuberant animal spirits, but as a whole his 
life appears to have been one of suffering. He was not teaching 
to his satisfaction — he confesses this in his letter of resigna- 
tion. 1 Moreover, the thought came over him at times that his 
strength, supposing that he could turn it to account, lay in 
writing rather than in teaching — in any case that he was coming 
to have views of his own and that he ought to be developing 
them. Questions of this sort had disturbed his academic serenity 
before. Twice — in 1874 and even as early as 1870 — he had been 
tenkpted to renounce his university work : his free time was too 
little, and he could not say his best ' ' to the boys. ' ' 2 But now 
a grave illness precipitated matters, and he definitively put an 
end to his teaching career. The University granted him a pen- 
sion of 3,000 francs a year, and with this and a little income 
of his own (the whole amounting to around $1,000.00) he began 
that entirely private life as a thinker which ended with his 
apoplectic stroke ten years later. The intervening years were 
spent mostly in the south of Europe — as stated in the opening 
chapter. It was a lonely existence for the most part ; he sorely 
missed the presence and sympathy of friends. Indeed, he had 
already lost many of his early friends, so unusual was the 
course his thinking had taken. He found refuge with books 

1 See Werke (pocket ed.), IV, ix, x. 

* See Richter, op. cit., pp. 57-9; Ziegler, op. cit., p. 79. 

148 



GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD 149 

and with solitary nature — and, I might add, with people in the 
humbler walks of life ; his sister remarks that in Genoa during 
the winter of 1880 and 1881 he perhaps first came to know the 
common people, finding much that was lovable in them, and 
they showing a kind of affectionate reverence for him. 3 Some- 
thing in his manner of life at this time is hinted at in a private 
memorandum. His ideal, he says, is "an independence that 
does not offend the eye, a softened and veiled pride, one that 
equalizes things with others (sich dbzahlt an die Anderen) by 
not competing for their honors and enjoyments, and not mind- 
ing ridicule. This shall ennoble my habits of life : to be never 
common and always courteous, not to be covetous, but to strive 
quietly and keep in the upper air ; to be frugal, even niggardly 
toward myself, but unexacting (milde) toward others. Light 
sleep, a free quiet step, no alcohol, no princes or other nota- 
bilities, no women or newspapers, no honors, no intercourse 
except with the highest spirits and now and then with the 
common people — this is as indispensable as the sight of vigor- 
ous and healthy vegetation — foods easiest had, which do not 
take one into the press of greedy and smacking crowds, 
if possible self-prepared foods, or those not needing prepara- 
tion." 4a 

At least six or seven of these years belong to the third 
period of Nietzsche 's life — though fixing a date for its beginning 
is a more or less arbitrary thing. Some scholars put Dawn of 
Day (1881) and Joyful Science (1882) into it, others class 
these works with those of the second period, while still others — 
and with probably the greatest show of reason — think that they 
mark the transition from one period to the other. The fact is 
that there is no break, no catastrophic change, such as occurred 
in 1876. All we can truthfully say is that gradually the tone 
becomes more positive, that, while criticism continues or is even 
sharper than ever, constructive thinking appears more and more, 
and an approach to a comprehensive world-view. 

The books unquestionably belonging to this period include 
the two which are the best known, or rather most quoted, of all 
of Nietzsche's works, Thus spake Zarathustra (1883-5) and 
Beyond Good and Evil (1885-6) ; also Towards the Genealogy 

*Werke (pocket ed.), V, xvi. * Werke, XI, 390, §613. 



150 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

of Morals* (1887), Twilight of the Idols (1888), The Anti- 
christian* (1888), "The Case of Wagner" and "Nietzsche 
contra Wagner" (both 1888, and little more than pamphlets). 
Besides these, are the autobiographical notes (not originally 
meant for publication) entitled Ecce Homo, and voluminous 
material for a contemplated and never achieved systematic 
work, Will to Power — material which has been more or less 
successfully put together by later hands and now appears under 
that title (second and much improved edition, 1906). There 
are also three posthumous volumes of private notes and unfin- 
ished sketches. 7 

ii 

The most general mark of the period is confidence — one 
might say, joy: the book which may be taken as a herald 
of it is entitled Joyful Science (Die frohliche Wissenschaft) . 8 
Nietzsche is now quite emerging from the gloom and depression 
that had ensued on the overthrow of his first ideals. He had 
momentarily lost his goal ; he is now sure of one. He needed a 
cure from his early romanticism, he had had too much sweet, 
too rich a diet; but he has got it — and is well again (in soul, at 
least). 9 Chastened, disciplined, he feels once more ready for 
battle. As our fathers, he says, brought sacrifices of wealth 

5 The German title is " Zur Genealogie der Moral" the " Zur " indi- 
cating that Nietzsche pretends to nothing more than contributions to the 
subject. 

6 The German title, " Der Antichrist," is commonly translated, in 
questionable fashion, " The Antichrist." The German " der Christ " does 
not usually signify "Christ," but "the Christian'" (" Christus" is the 
word for Christ), and " der Antichrist" is naturally (if not necessarily) 
"The Antichristian." In translating as I do I am happy to find myself 
following the best French authority on Nietzsche, Henri Lichtenberger, 
who renders " L'Antichretien." The late R. M. Meyer, perhaps the best 
all-round authority on Nietzsche in Germany, thought that while Nietzsche 
played with the double meaning of the word, Lichtenberger's translation 
was the correct one (this in a private letter to the writer). 

T These are Vols. XII, XIII, XIV of the German octavo edition. A 
small part of this material is given at the end of Vols. VII and VIII of 
the German pocket edition; in the English translation it is almost entirely 
lacking, as is also the greater part of the posthumous Vols. IX, X, and 
XI of the German octavo edition, covering Nietzsche's first and second 
periods. 

8 Cf. Joyful Science, §324, beginning "No! Life has not deceived 
me! " 

8 Preface, § 1, to Joyful Science. Cf. preface (of 1886), § 2, to Mixed 
Opinions etc., where this book, along with Human, etc., and The Wan- 
derer etc., is spoken of as his " anti-romantic self-treatment." 



GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD 151 

and blood, rank and country to Christianity, so will we sacrifice, 
not for our doubts or unbelief, but for our faith. 10 

Nietzsche once said, in referring to Human, All-too-Human, 
"It is necessary to take up this whole positivism into myself, 
and none the less be a bearer of idealism. ' ' ll By positivism 
he means positive knowledge, i.e., the attitude which insists on 
actual facts, as distinguished from fancies and speculations. 
We have seen something of his passion for verity in the previous 
period, his wish to face facts, however bare, comfortless, or 
empty of higher significance they might be; and we are not 
to imagine that he ever becomes an uncritical idealist again — 
he has no lapses such as are common among those who become 
tired of doubt; in Dawn of Day, with his face setting in the 
new direction, he speaks of " idealizing " as reprovingly as ever 
he had when his positivistic attitude was at its height. 12 And 
yet this attitude takes now a secondary place, for he feels that 
it is not equal to the whole of life. Philosophy is to his mind 
something more than science, or even criticism and critical 
science, counter as this view was to the prevailing opinion in 
his day. He advances a variety of considerations at different 
times and in different connections — I state them here in my 
own order. In the first place, certain knowledge is not always 
to be had, and in action we have often to go on chances and 
possibilities — indeed there is a certain weakness in always want- 
ing to know, in not being ready for risks. 13 Secondly, facts of 
themselves are miscellaneous, scattering — it is really a bric-a- 
brac of conceptions that so-called positivism is bringing to 
market today; they need to be interpreted, related, put in 
order. 14 The special sciences cannot make themselves inde- 
pendent of philosophy, which is a general view from a height 
above them, involving an "TJeberblick, TJmblick, Niederblick." ^ 
Philosophers have usually been against their time, and now 
there is a duty incumbent on them to oppose the tendency to 

10 Joyful Science, § 377. 

11 1 rely here upon Riehl (op. cit., p. 184), who cites Werke, XI, 499 
(presumably the first edition, which is not accessible to me). There is 
something similar in Werke, XIV, 351, §211. 

12 Cf. §§299, 427. 

1S Joyful Science, §§ 347, 375. 

14 Beyond Oood and Evil, § 10. 

18 Ibid., §§204-5. 



152 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

put every one into a corner and speciality. "What I wish is 
that the genuine concept of the philosopher shall not entirely 
perish in Germany. ' ' 16 b Nietzsche even goes to the length of 
questioning whether there are any bare facts separable from 
interpretation of some kind, whether it is possible, as some pro- 
pose, to stand by the facts simply and not go beyond them — he 
does not think much of the idea of putting philosophy "upon a 
strictly scientific basis." 17 

Moreover, facts have to be valued as well as ascertained — 
and it appears to be his opinion that the ultimate canon for 
interpreting, relating, and ordering is derived from the valuing 
process. The valuing attitude is sharply contrasted with the 
"scientific" one. It is not a mere mirroring of the facts, and 
Nietzsche draws a satirical picture of the "objective" man who 
mirrors everything and is nothing — presque rien. 18 It involves 
choosing, preferring, judging of facts — that is, a standard which 
is independent of them and is projected by the mind. Zara- 
thustra accordingly is represented as having left the house of 
scholars who only want to observe; the present age seems to 
him one of polyglot knowledge, not one of belief and creative 
capacity. 19 This prostrating oneself before facts, without stand- 
ards by which to judge of them, has become a sort of cultus — 
Nietzsche admits that Taine is an example of it. 20 The only 
explanation of it is that men have been long happy" in the unreal 
and are now surfeited with it. 21 Positivism is a rebound against 
Romanticism, the work of undeceived romanticists. 22 But to 
love the real, irrespective of its quality and character, is to be 
tasteless. Zarathustra does not like those to whom each and 
every thing is good and this world the best world — he honors 
rather refractory, fastidious tongues and stomachs that have 
learned to say " I, " and " Yes " and " No. " » The trouble with 

10 Ibid., §212; Will to Power, §420. 

11 Will to Power, § 477; Genealogy etc., Ill, § 24. 
18 Beyond Good and Evil, § 207. 

18 Thus spake Zarathustra, II, xvi, xiv. 

20 Will to Power, §422. I say "admits," because Taine was one of 
the first to give Nietzsche recognition, and Nietzsche did not forget it. 

21 Dawn of Day, § 244. 

22 Werke, XIV, 341, § 194. 

28 Zarathustra, III, xi, § 2 (I am reminded of an inscription I saw- 
on the lintel of a house in the Via del Campo, Genoa, Non omnia sed 
bona et bene ) . 



GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD 153 

our science today is its ideallessness, its lack of a great love. 24 
For it is man's task to set himself an end, and thereby a standard 
of value — above all is this the task of man at his highest, of the 
philosopher. The sciences are preliminary and preparatory to 
this supreme functioning — the solving the problem of value, 
the determining the order of precedence in values. 25 Genuine 
philosophers say, "So should things be" — they are com- 
manders and legislators; they determine the Whither? and 
For what? of man, laying creative hands on the future, and 
turning all that is or was into means and instrument. Nietzsche 
puts it boldly, "Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is a 
legislating, their will to truth is — will to power."™ That is 
(stating the matter in my own language), we human beings can 
observe, but we can also strive for that which is past all observ- 
ing, since it is the projection of our minds and imagination, 
and belongs as yet among the viewless and, strictly speaking, 
non-existent things of the world. We can look at existence, 
whether ourselves or reality outside us, as so much matter, v\rf 9 
on which we are to impress a higher form. Science at its best 
is necessarily fragmentary — and equally so is history; if we 
limit ourselves to their report of things, we leave out the whole 
area of possibility. To quote Nietzsche's own words: "Man is 
something fluid and plastic — we can make out of him what we 
will." 27 Again, "In man is creature and creator in one: there 
is matter, fragment, superfluity, clay, excrement, unreason,, 
chaos — but also creator, former, the hardness of the hammer,. 
the contemplativeness of a God, and the glory of the seventh 
day." 28 Instead of Schopenhauer's doctrine of redemption 
from existence, Zarathustra (Nietzsche) gives us a doctrine of 
the re-creation of existence. Every fragmentary "it was" is to 
be changed into a "so I would have it": 29 the doctrine rests on 
a belief in the changeability of the world and in the power of 
men to make change. 

Accordingly we feel — not always, but as a rule — an atmos- 

24 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 23. 

20 Note at end of Genealogy etc., I. 

20 Beyond Good and Evil, §211. 

27 Werke, XII, 362, § 690. 

28 Beyond Good and Evil, § 225. 

29 Zarathustra, II, xx; III, xii, §3. 



154 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

phere of great faith in this last period. We know our powers, 
he says, not our power — we should regard ourselves as a vari- 
able quantity whose capacity of performance might be of the 
highest under favorable circumstances. 30 " Raphael without 
hands/' i.e., genius without the happy conditions that lend it 
power to execute, — may it not be the rule rather than the 
exception? The world — particularly the human world 31 — is a 
bottomless rich sea. Things which have been long weak and 
embryonic may at last come to light; unconscious possibilities 
in fathers may stand revealed in their children or children's 
children — we all have hidden gardens and plantations within 
us, or, to use another metaphor, are volcanoes which may some 
day have an hour of eruption ; 32 even in the souls of Germans, 
" these poor bears,' 1 lurk ''hidden nymphs and wood-gods" and 
"still higher divinities." 33 Nietzsche is as far as ever from de- 
riving our higher powers or qualities (after the manner of Kant 
or Schopenhauer) from a metaphysical source • but they are real 
all the same — he once speaks of the hero who is hidden in every 
man, and he can imagine transgressors giving themselves up to 
justice. 34 Though our unrealized possibilities are a chaos rather 
than a cosmos, a kind of milky way or labyrinth, 35 his faith is 
plainly that order, suns and stars, may come out of them. If 
man is sicklier and more uncertain than any other animal, it 
is just because he makes so many changes — because of the unde- 
fined range of his possibilities. He the great experimenter with 
himself, the unsatisfied, who enters the lists for the last 
supremacy with animals, nature, and Gods; he the still uncon- 
quered, the eternally expectant, whose own inner force urges 
him on and gives him no rest — how could he not be liable to 
maladies such as nothing else in nature knows? 36 We know 
what is or was, not what may be or might have been. Nietzsche 
touches on Plato's reforming thoughts and attempts to carry 
them into effect in Sicily — he thinks it conceivable that he 
should have succeeded, even as the legislation of Mohammed 
went into effect among his Arabs, and the still stranger 
thoughts of Christianity prevailed in another quarter: a few 

80 Dawn of Day, § 326. S4 Ibid., § 78; Dawn of Day, § 322. 

31 Zarathustra, IV, i. 35 Joyful Science, § 322. 

82 Joyful Science, § 9. 80 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 13. 
80 Ibid., § 105. 



GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD 155 

accidents less and a few accidents more, and there might have 
been a Platonizing of Southern Europe — though as things 
turned out, Plato has come to be known as a fantast and Utopian 
(harder names perhaps having been used in ancient Athens). 37 

Naturally along with the larger outlook is a fresh apprecia- 
tion of poetry. He thinks that poets might do more than paint 
an Arcady, nor should it be necessary for them to employ their 
imagination in falsifying reality; it is their high mission to 
open to us the realm of the possible. Starting with suggestions 
from the course of evolution in the past, they might with bold 
fantasy anticipate what will or may be — picture virtues such 
as have never been on earth, and higher races of men. "All 
our poetry is so restricted, earthly (kleinhurgerlich-erden- 
haft)." He waits for seers who will tell us of the possible, 
astronomers of the ideal who will reveal to us purple-glowing 
constellations and whole milky ways of the beautiful. First 
after the death of religion [in the old sense] can invention in 
the realm of the Divine again luxuriate — and perhaps just 
because we can no longer flee to God, the sea within ourselves 
may rise higher. 38 He knows the charm, too, of poets who but 
imperfectly express the vision of their souls, who give us fore- 
tastes of the vision rather than the vision itself : 39 it is the charm 
of suggestiveness — a very different charm and a much whole- 
somer one than that upon which George Eliot dilates in "A 
Minor Prophet," where imperfection becomes almost dear for 
its own sake. 

To sum up: if science, knowledge of the actual whatever 
becomes of ideals, may be taken as the characteristic note of 
the second period, science and the ideal are the note of the third. 
Close observation of reality and an unblanched face before it 
continue, but there is a fresh sense that the actual is only a part 
of the totality of things. Science is simply a negative test — we 
must not have ideals which are inconsistent with it. 40 Accord- 
ingly Nietzsche is happy again — but with an ennobled, purified 

87 Dawn of Day, § 496. 

"Ibid., §551; Werke, XI, 328, §440; Joyful Science, §285 (cf. 
Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 2 ) . 

89 Joyful Science, § 79. 

40 This is the general standpoint, though he says that science " has 
nothing against a new ideal" (Werke, XI, 376, §571). 



156 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

happiness. Frau Andreas-Salome thinks that the land of his 
future expectations was not really a new one, but the old one 
from which he originally set out — and in a deep sense this is 
true; but she admits that the products of the new period were 
more or less shaped by the experiences of the intervening years. 
il Certain great perspectives of the spiritual and moral horizon 
tire my strongest springs of life," he wrote her, after referring 
to the fearful existence of renunciation he had been obliged to 
lead. "I also have morning-dawns . . . what I no longer be- 
lieved . . . appears now possible — as the golden morning dawn 
on the horizon of all my future life. ' ' 41 

in 

Though the general outlines of the world are much the same 
to Nietzsche as in the preceding period, conceptions of possi- 
bility and change and man's power play, as just intimated, an 
ever larger part. One might almost say that he becomes optimist. 
He had earlier said, "Away with the wearisomely hackneyed 
terms, optimism and pessimism ! ' ' He maintained that they stood 
for theological contentions, and that no one cared any longer for 
the theologians — except the theologians themselves. Good and 
bad have only human references — the world itself is neither 
good nor bad (not to say best and worst), and we should stop 
both glorifying it and reviling it in this way. 42 But favorable 
or unfavorable judgments of the world may be based on other 
grounds, and he inclines more and more to a favorable judg- 
ment. The world comes to seem good to him just as it is, 
without any intrinsic order, or inherent purpose, or moral gov- 
ernance — good, that is, as a place one is willing and glad to live 
in. 43 Indeed, he approximates to religious feeling about it — at 
least he uses religious language. His mouthpiece, Zarathustra, 
says, "To blaspheme against the earth is now the most dreadful 
thing.' ' ** Even change and accident are regarded with a semi- 
religious veneration. All becoming is to Zarathustra a "dance 
of Gods," a "wantonness of Gods." 45 The earth is likened to 

41 Lou Andreas-Salome, op. cit., pp. 136-8. 

42 Human, etc., § 28. 

49 See the condemnation of pessimism in Dawn of Day, §§329, 561; 
Joyful Science, §§ 134, 357; Will to Power, § 701. 
4 * Zarathustra, prologue, § 3. 
45 Ibid., Ill, xii, § 2. 



VIEW OF THE WORLD 157 

a dice-table — one which Gods have spread out, and on which 
they play with men; it trembles from the throws they make 
and their creative new words. 46 We hear of the " heaven of 
accident " standing over all things — and to teach that accident 
has so high and ruling a place in the world is not to revile, but 
to bless. 47 In The Antichristian, after saying that indignation 
at the general aspect of things is, along with pessimism, the 
privilege of the Tschandala [the lowest class of men 48 ] , Nietzsche 
uses this remarkable language : "The world is perfect — so speaks 
the instinct of the most spiritual men, the affirmative instinct — ■ 
imperfection, what lies beneath us of every kind, distance, the 
pathos of distance, the Tschandala himself belongs to this per- 
fection." 49 

This does not mean that Nietzsche has altered in the slightest 
his estimate of things from a moral standpoint — that he is not 
still pessimist, as most would understand that term. "We are 
seethed," he says, "in the view, and have become cold and hard 
in it, that things do not go on at all divinely in the world, or 
even according to human measure rationally, mercifully, or 
justly; we know it, the world in which we live, is undivine, 
unmoral, 'unhuman' " — that it is not valuable in the way we 
have believed is the surest result we have. 50 Injury, violence, 
stealing, killing inhere in all life. 51 He honors Schopenhauer 
(in contrast with men like Schiller, W. von Humboldt, 
Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Schelling) for seeing the world as 
it is, and the deviltry of it. 52 He feels himself an heir of the 
veracity and old-fashioned piety of Luther, who recognized that 
reason could not of itself make out a just and merciful govern- 
ment of the world, and of Kant, who saw that morality could 
not be based on nature and history, since immorality ruled 
there ; 53 d both, that is, had to put the Divine outside the world 
(a logic which our new "immanent" theologians might well 
ponder over). But, he in effect argues, because we are pes- 

i6 Ibid., Ill, xvi, §3. 

47 Ibid., Ill, iv. 

48 For a more exact meaning of the Hindu term, see later, p. 453. 

49 The Antickristian, §57; cf. Zarathustra, IV, x; Will to Power, 
§§ 1031, 1033. 

60 Joyful Science, § 346. 

01 Zarathustra, III, xii, §10; Genealogy etc., II, §11. 

62 Dawn of Day, § 190. 

63 Preface, §§3, 4, to Dawn of Day. 



158 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

simists in this sense, because the world has not the particular 
value commonly ascribed to it, it does not follow that it is less 
valuable — it may be more so. For what are the standards of 
value which are commonly set up? what is it that is deified? 
Goodness, justice, love. But what are goodness, justice, love 
but qualities by the help of which men get along together in 
societies, necessary rules for their association in flocks? What 
are we doing then but taking certain utilities of flock-life and 
making a God of them, an absolute standard by which the world 
is judged, so that it is good if it conforms to them and bad if 
it does not. 54 It seems a presumptuous thing to Nietzsche, an 
extravagant aberration of human vanity and unreason — indeed 
he finds something laughable in man's proposing to invent 
values that are to exceed the value of the actual world. 55 

How the world is still valuable in his eyes after the downfall 
of moralistic faith, we have already seen in part and shall see 
more clearly later on. I may only say in general now that it is 
the possible outcome of existence, which justifies existence to his 
mind — the type or types of life that may emerge. It is not 
that pleasure may preponderate over pain — to considerations of 
pleasure and pain he gives a quite secondary place. Every 
sound individual, he thinks, refuses to judge life by these 
incidents. Pain might preponderate, and there be none the 
less a mighty will to life, a saying yes to it, a feeling even of 
the necessity of this preponderance. 56 A measure of the will's 
power is its capacity to endure opposition, pain, and torture, 
and to turn them to advantage. With this in mind, he says, 
"I do not reckon the evil and painful character of existence 
an objection to it, but hope that it will sometime be more evil 
and more painful than heretofore." 57 He despises the "pes- 
simism of sensibility" and calls it "a sign of deep impoverish- 
ment of life" ; 58 more than once he quotes Voltaire's lines, 

u Un monstre gai vaut mieux 
Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux." ** 

He thus departs widely from Spencerian and all hedonistic 
measurements of the worth of life. When we come into the 

54 Will to Power, § 32. ,T Ibid., § 382. 

65 Joyful Science, § 34G. * s Ibid., §§701, 707. 

58 Will to Power, § 35. •• Ibid., §§35, 91. 



VIEW OF THE WORLD 159 

region and atmosphere of his thoughts, it is like passing into 
a new zone and climate. If we still call his view pessimism, 
we must admit that it is, to use his own phrase, "Dionysiac 
pessimism," one that affirms life despite or even because of 
suffering and change and death, and so practically as good as 
optimism — one might say better than the soft sweet thing which 
often goes by that name. He speaks of Dionysiac pessimism 
as his proprium and ipsissimum.™ e If nature, in her ceaseless 
flow of change and accident, gives a chance for greatness, it is 
to him enough. 61 

IV 

Some details in his picture of the world may now be given, 
though they are not absolutely new. (1) Let us guard, he says, 
against conceiving of the world as a living or organic thing. 
Toward what should it develope ? From what should it be nour- 
ished ? How could it grow and increase ? Living organic things 
are simply phenomena in it — and late and rare phenomena. 
(2) Nor should we regard it as a machine — a machine is some- 
thing constructed for an end, and the world has no marks of 
being constructed in this way; we really do it too much honor 
in speaking of it as a machine. (3) We should guard against 
assuming that the regular cyclic movements of our and neighbor- 
ing planets are everywhere — there may be much ruder and more 
contradictory movements, our astral order being an exception, 
and chaos marking the world as a whole (chaos in the sense of 
an absence, not of necessity, but of order, organization, form, 
beauty). (4) There is no occasion for blaming or praising the 
world. We should avoid ascribing to it heartlessness and 
unreason or the opposite. It is neither perfect nor beautiful, 
nor noble, and has no wish to be — it does not at all strive to 
imitate man and none of our aesthetic or moral judgments hit 
it. It has not even an impulse of self-preservation, or impulses 
of any kind. (5) It also knows no laws. Let us be on our 
guard against saying that there are laws in nature — there are 
only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who 
obeys, no one who transgresses. Moreover, since there are no 
ends in nature, there is strictly speaking no accident; only in 

60 Joyful Science, § 370. 61 Cf. Daion of Day, § 191. 



160 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

a world of ends has the word "accident" a meaning. (6) Let 
ns be on our guard against making death the antithesis of life — 
the living is only a species of the dead, and a rare species. (7) 
Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world eternally 
creates new things (it is really a finite quantity, and sooner 
or later reaches the limits of its power). 62 Moreover, it is im- 
portant to stop speaking of the All as if it were a unity, a force, 
an absolute of some kind — we easily come in this way to take 
it as a highest instance and to christen it "God." We must 
split up the All, unlearn any particular respect for it, bring 
back feelings we have given to the unknown and the whole, and 
devote them to things next us, our own things. The All raises 
ever the old problems, ' ' How is evil possible ? ' ' and so on. To 
speak bluntly, there is no All, the great sensorium or inven- 
torium or storehouse of power is lacking. 63 Nietzsche is thus 
altogether a pluralist. Such unities as we find are, to him, 
derived and created things, and lie in a larger sea of the chaotic. 
This is true not only of the world at large, but of an individual 
soul. Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in cyclic 
paths are not the deepest; he who looks into the vast space 
within himself and is aware of the milky ways there, knows 
also how irregular all milky ways are — they lead into the chaos 
and labyrinth of existence. 64 Nietzsche is accordingly distrust- 
ful of systematizers, and he conjectures their descent from 
registrars and office-secretaries, whose business it was to label 
things and put them in their pigeonholes. 65 "He is a thinker: 
that means that he understands how to take things more simply 
than they are." 66 Particularly now, when science is just be- 
ginning its work, does system-building seem to him childish- 
ness. "I am not narrow enough for a system — and not even 
for my system. " w f 

But though Nietzsche regards the world as a more or less 
chaotic, irregular thing, 68 he avoids, as already stated, thinking 

''Joyful Science, § 109; cf. Werke, XII, 58-9. 

63 Will to Power, § 331. 

•* Joyful Science, § 322. 

"Dawn of Day, §318; Joyful Science, §348; cf. Twilight of the 
Idols, I, §26; and what his sister says, Werke (pocket ed.), IX, xviii. 

6 s Joyful Science, § 189. 

• 7 Werke, XIV, 413, §292; 354, §217. 

e * Cf. Joyful Science, §§277, 322; Werke (pocket ed.), VII, xviii 
{chaos sive natura) ; Will to Power, § 711. 



VIEW OF THE WORLD 161 

of it as infinite, whether in extent or power — such a view seems 
to him an unwarranted extravagance. Though immense and 
practically immeasurable, it is none the less a definite quantity, 
something capable neither of increase nor of diminution, sur- 
rounded by nothing, for there is nothing outside of it, terms 
of this sort being applicable only to relations within it and 
empty space being but a name. 69 In no way does he more 
radically depart from modern, romantic, Christian notions and 
return to old Greek habits of thought, than in this view of a 
finite rather than infinite world. As Zarathustra sees it in a 
dream, the world is something measurable, weighable, corn- 
passable, divinable — not, indeed, simple enough to put men's 
minds to sleep, and yet not enigmatic enough to scare away 
human love, a kind of humanly good thing, like a perfect apple, 
or a broad-boughed tree, or a treasure-box open for the delight 
of modest revering eyes. 70 It is, indeed, of such measured scope 
that the things which once happened in it are likely, or even 
bound in the course of time, to happen again — there cannot 
be ever new things. Sometime the possibilities of change will 
be exhausted, and then the new things will be old things over 
again. This becomes a special doctrine which we shall consider 
in the next chapter. Suffice it now to say that by this recur- 
rence, and, supposing that time goes on forever, ever renewed 
recurrence of the past, a semblance of succession or order arises 
in the world, despite its chance nature — or rather just because of 
this, for the recurrence is entirely a matter of accident and 
necessity, not the result of any design or ordering will. 

Nietzsche's attitude to chaos and accident is a double one. 
Because of what may 'come out of it, and partly because it 
represents the actual conditions of existence which a brave man 
will accept anyway, he speaks at times of "beautiful chaos," 
"dear accident." In this mood amor fati is his motto. He 
writes on the opening of a new year, "I will ever more learn 
to recognize the necessary in things as the beautiful, — so shall 
I be one of those who make things beautiful: let this be from 
now on my love!" 71 Zarathustra calls (by a play on words 

86 Werke, XII, 52, §§ 91-2; Will to Power, § 1067. 
T0 Zarathustra, III, x, § 1. 
T1 Joyful Science, §§276-7. 



162 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

which it is impossible to give the effect of in English) "von 
Ohngefahr," literally "by chance/' the oldest nobility in the 
world, and says that the heaven above him is so pure and high, 
just because there is no spider or spider-web of reason there, 
because it is a dancing-ground for divine accidents, a divine 
table for divine dice and dice-players. 72 And yet we are not 
to infer that Nietzsche reveres chance or accident for itself, 
and sometimes we find him describing it as a giant to be 
fought. 73 So far as man is concerned, it is at best an oppor- 
tunity, a situation from which something may be wrested. He 
speaks of compelling accidents to dance in measure like the 
stars. 74 He instances the way in which a master of musical 
improvising will, if he strikes an accidental note, turn it to 
account — fitting it into the thematic framework and giving it 
a beautiful meaning and soul. 75 He represents Zarathustra as 
superior to chance: the prophet uses it, boils it in his pot — 
indeed, only in this way does it become his eatable meat. 76g 
Nietzsche is perfectly aware that those who do not know how 
to use chance, may find in it their undoing. 

T2 Zarathustra, III, iv. TB Joyful Science, § 303. 

TS Ibid., I, xxii, § 2. ,e Zarathustra, III, v, § 3. 

■"Ibid., Ill, xvi, §3. 



CHAPTER XIV 
THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 



Allusion was made in the preceding chapter to the idea of 
recurrence as a part of Nietzsche's general view of the world; 
I shall now treat it with some particularity. 1 It is sometimes 
regarded as fanciful or mystical. Professor Ziegler calls it "a 
phantastic hypothesis. ' ' 2 Professor Riehl relegates it to the 
childhood of science — it cannot be proved or even made proba- 
ble. 3 A distinguished German physician and psychiatrist even 
thinks that when a conceit, which might have been pardonable 
in the times of Pythagoras, unhinges a man who has read Kant, 
something is the matter with him. 4 Professor Pringle-Pattison 
can only say, "So long as it remained a real possibility 
which might be established on scientific grounds, it haunted him 
like a nightmare ; so soon as it receded into the realm of specu- 
lative fantasy, he began hymns to eternity as to a bride, and 
to the marriage ring of recurrence ' ' 5 — that is, he was attracted 
to it in inverse proportion to its scientific character. Even Dr. 
Dolson speaks of this " half -mystic doctrine." 6 It must be ad- 
mitted that Nietzsche is himself partly responsible for views of 
this sort. He once speaks of the idea as if it had come to him 
suddenly — the day and place are specified. 7 There is a descrip- 
tion of it that is weird and uncanny — the details are almost 
like those of a nightmare. 8 And yet if we look into Nietzsche's 

1 The relevant passages are Werke, XII, 51-69 (or, pocket ed. VI, 
3-21), 369-71; Joyful Science, §341; Zarathustra, III, ii, §2; xiii; xvi; 
IV, xix; Beyond Good and Evil, §56; Will to Power, §§55, 417, 617, 
1053-67. The reference to the allied Pythagorean speculation is in "The 
Use and Harm of History, etc.," sect. 2. 

2 Op. cit., p. 133. 

8 Op. cit., pp. 137-8. 

4 P. J. Mobius, op. cit., p. 103. 

5 Op. cit., p. 291. 

6 Grace N. Dolson, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 83. 

7 Ecco Homo, III, vi, § 1. 
c Joyful Science, § 341. 

163 



164 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

general psychological world, we see that the idea arose with 
something like logical necessity, that it has broad theoretic 
grounds. 

First, we must remember that to Nietzsche the world was a 
finite quantity (as explained in the last chapter). Undulations 
in the amount of existence, now more and now less, were to him 
unthinkable. He believed that the modern doctrine of the con- 
servation of energy pointed that way. Fixed or definite, and 
infinite were contradictory terms. A refusal to speak of 
infinite force he regarded as one of the marks of scientific, in 
contrast with the old religious habits of thought. 9 Second, he 
refused to admit the idea of empty space around the world. 
The notion of infinite space was gratuitous ; he thought it based 
on the conception of empty space, which is an abstraction and 
unreal, all space being full of force of some kind. Space itself, 
as a separate category from matter or force, was an unreality, 
a subjective form. 10 But on the other hand (thirdly), he had 
come by this time to believe in the reality of time; there was 
a before and after irrespective of our thought or experience of 
it — and to this before and after no limits could be set, it was 
infinite. 11 a We have then so far a finite sum of force working 
in infinite time. And now, following ordinary ideas of causality, 
he argues that there can have been no beginning to the activity 
of the force (this a fourth point), that change of some kind 
must have been forever going on. But, the question may be 
asked, Granting all this, may not the activity at some time come 
to an end ? May not an equilibrium be finally reached — a state 
in which, activity having played its part, becoming passes into 
being, a changeless goal of all preceding change? Nietzsche 
does not deny that this is conceivable, but he argues that if it 
were really possible, the goal would have been already reached, 
since time extends infinitely backwards as well as forwards and 
in absolutely unlimited time everything that could have hap- 
pened must have happened. The simple fact then that an 
equilibrium does not exist now (for once reached, it would last 
forever), proves that there never was an equilibrium, and never 

°Werhe, XII, 52-3; Will to Power, §§1063, 1066. 
10 Werke, XII, 54, §§97-8; Will to Power, § 1067. 
"Werke, XII, 51, §90; 54, §98. 



THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 165 

could be — that the world is eternally in process of change. The 
mechanical view, as sometimes expounded, leads one to antici- 
pate a final state in which heat and all forms of energy are 
evenly dispersed through space, so that transformations become 
thereafter impossible (save by a miracle of some kind) ; but 
Nietzsche goes so far as to say that if the mechanical theory 
cannot escape the consequences of a final stationary state, such 
as Sir William Thomson describes, the theory is ipso facto dis- 
proved. If any such state were really possible, it would have 
been attained in the limitless stretches of past time, and we (if 
there were any sense in speaking of "we" in such a connection, 
being ourselves changeable beings) should be in it. 12b 

Fifthly, so far as the special cosmic order now existing is 
concerned, Nietzsche thinks, agreeably to current views, that it 
had a beginning sometime in the past. There -was some rela- 
tively simple state of forces, from which the present more or 
less organized world has gradually evolved. Moreover, all the 
processes of this evolution, even the minutest details of it, hang 
together — so much so, that if any least thing were different 
from what it is, all other things would have to be different too, 
and if we approve any one thing we have to approve everything 
else, each being bound up with the others, whether as condition 
or consequence. And as this cosmic order began, so it will in 
the course of time end, the forces relapsing into some such 
unorganized state as they had at the start. 13 This view of a 
relative beginning and end of things is a common one, and it 
is at least not uncommon to think that after one ending there 
will in time be another beginning — so that, if we go far enough 
along this line, we gain the idea of a succession of worlds or 
cosmic orders. 

So far as there is any novelty in Nietzsche's speculation, it 
is from this point on. It by no means follows, he thinks, that 
because these worlds follow one another they will, be like one 
another, save under certain extremely general aspects. They 
may differ widely. Mechanical laws as we know them may not 
be strictly necessary, and so it may be with chemical affinity 

12 See Werlce, XFi, 53, §95; 55-6, §§100, 103; 62, §114; Will to 
Power, §§ 1062, 1066. 

13 Werlce, XII, 54, § 97; Will to Power, § 1032. 



166 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

and cohesion — they may be simply temporary habits of things, 
holding while the present cosmic order lasts, and perhaps not 
universally or permanently even here. All depends on the 
initial state of things, the way forces happen to have been col- 
located there. With one combination or constellation of forces 
one kind of world will result, and with another, another. 
There may be as many different kinds of worlds as there can 
be different arrangements and collocations of the primitive 
forces. To our world may then succeed a totally different kind 
of world, just as one totally different may have preceded it. 
There is no ordering of these things, no controlling design regu- 
lating them — it is all chance and accident. 14 But — and here is 
the real turning-point of Nietzsche's thought — in the course of 
time, supposing that it goes on indefinitely, the different possible 
combinations of forces will have all been made. If the total 
amount of force, however vast and practicably incalculable, is 
definite, fixed, the number of combinations which its con- 
stituent parts can make is not limitless; the number may be 
myriad, but it cannot be infinite. If then the limit is reached, 
there can thereafter only be repetitions of the combinations 
that have already occurred — new ones are impossible (sixth 
point). 15 

I may offer a very simple — seemingly too simple — illustration 
on my own account. Suppose that we — the reader and I — are 
playing dice. We throw various numbers, various combinations 
oi numbers. There is no regularity in the succession — it is all 
haphazard (if we play a fair game and let chance be chance 
absolutely). Some time may elapse before either of us reaches 
any special combination, say double sixes. And yet, sooner or 
later we do reach it, both of us do — not because we will it, but 
because chance itself in the course of time is bound to give it to 
us. If we play on and on and do not reach it, we inevitably 
suspect that something is the matter with the dice, i.e., that 
they have been loaded, that pure chance does not rule. So of 
each and every combination — we are bound to throw them all, 
if we take sufficient time, and there has been no tampering with 
the dice. But after we have thrown all the combinations, what 

"WerJce, XII, 58-60; Will to Power, § 1066. 

15 Werke, XII, 51, § 90; 61, § 109; Will to Power, § 1066. 






THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 167 

else is there for us to do, if we go on playing, but to throw 
the old ones over again? The recurrence of the old ones is of 
Strict necessity — it is chance and necessity in one. The order 
of the throws may be different, is likely to be different — but 
the repetitions themselves are unavoidable. Nor if there were 
numbers running into the thousands, or millions, or tens of 
millions, would it make any difference; if we played long 
enough, all possible combinations would in time be exhausted, 
and then, if we continued to play, the old combinations would 
be repeated. Moreover, if we or others had been playing before, 
there would have been, however great the number of combina- 
tions, the same exhaustion of them in course of time, and there- 
after a repetition of previous ones. Repetition, repetition without 
end, is the law in conditions like these. Grant the suppositions, 
finite numbers, infinite time, and pure chance (i.e., no inter- 
ference from an arbitrary will outside, whether in forming the 
dice to start with or in influencing our muscles in throwing), 
and the result is inevitable. 

The illustration is ridiculously simple — but I think it covers 
the nerve of Nietzsche's argument. Assuming his preliminary 
data, the same initial combination of the forces of existence 
would recur again and again, and each time there would ensue 
from that combination according to ordinary laws of cause and 
effect the same identical cosmic evolution, with exactly the same 
result at any given instant of the process. Indeed, Nietzsche 
argues that only in this way is there such a thing as strict iden- 
tity. In our existing world, no two things can be exactly alike, 
if only because they are differently located in space and 
outside forces impinge differently upon them, and no one thing 
can be identical with itself at different times for similar reasons. 
Whenever then in the distant ranges of the future, after our 
present world has relapsed into the simple and relatively 
chaotic state from which it once emerged, the fortuitous course 
of things shall again bring about a combination of forces like 
that of which our world is the result, a world precisely similar 
to ours will again develope and the whole secular process of 
evolution be repeated : at a certain point everything will be like 
what it is now, the stars, the sea, the land, the peoples, the 
philosophies, the arguments, you and I, down to the last detail 



168 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

of our existence. 16 Grant chance (i.e., the absence of any set 
will controlling things), grant a finite sum of forces which 
never began and never will cease to act, grant infinite time, 
grant the negation of infinite empty space in which forces might 
be dissipated, grant the determinist view of the connection of 
events, and the result is apparently unescapable. c It also follows 
that to such a recurrence of the world, another recurrence will 
be added later on, and to that, still another, — and so on ad 
infinitum. With equal necessity it follows that earlier editions 
of the world have existed — in this direction too, ad infinitum. 

As stated, there may be many kinds of worlds, and varying 
orders of succession between them. When our world passes 
away, it does not follow that at once or at any definite time it 
will be recomposed. Nietzsche especially warns us against the 
analogies of recurring planetary courses, or the ebb and flow of 
the sea, or day and night, or the seasons — all of which succeed 
one another regularly. 17 The point is not when or in what order 
recurrence takes place, but that it takes place. In one place he 
says that between each combination and its recurrence, all other 
possible combinations will have had their turn ; 18 this might be 
so, but it does not appear to be necessary — the repetition of the 
combination might come soon ; the only certainty is that it will 
come sometime, even if the whole gamut of combinations has 
to be swept. But though no regular order of succession can be 
predicated, existence comes in general to have a cyclic or circular 
character in this way. The same things are ever and anon 
recurring. Things do not simply cease to be as we commonly 
imagine — in time they come back to themselves. The flow of 
existence is not straight on — it bends and returns on itself. 
Hence Nietzsche's simile of the ring. <l Krumm — bent, curved — 
is the path of eternity, ' ' says Zarathustra. 19 No geometer makes 
the ring; it is nowise inconsistent with the " chaos" of things; 
it is a simple "irrational necessity, apart from any kind of 
formal, ethical, or aesthetic considerations. ' ' 20 For all that, it 
is necessary, eternal, involved in the very nature of things, an 

16 Cf. the picture in Joyful Science, §341. 

17 Werke, XII, 61, § 109. 

18 Will to Power, § 1066. 

19 Zarathustra, III, xiii, § 2. 

20 Werke, XII, 61, §110. 



THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 169 

eternal law of things. The course of the stars, the succession 
of seasons, day and night, may arise and pass away — the ring 
never. What is will come again — a breath of eternity touches 
things, all things; no thing so slight or so insignificant or so 
fleeting, but is in a sense eternalized. ' ' Everything goes, every- 
thing returns, eternally does the wheel of being roll ; everything 
dies, everything blossoms again, eternally does the year of being 
run its course; everything breaks, everything is put together 
again, eternally does the house of being build itself anew; all 
things separate, all things greet one another again, eternally is 
the ring of being true. ' ' 21 

ii 

The reader may detect a note of joy in the quotation just 
made, but if so, I am anticipating, for the first effect of the 
view was depressing. There are plain intimations of Nietz- 
sche's struggle with it in his writings, and we have also the 
testimony of one who for a while was in close contact with him — 
Fraulein von Salome, now Frau Professor Andreas-Salome of 
Gottingen. The idea was no more welcome at the start than 
some others to which his thinking had conducted him. He 
communicated it to few, dreading a possible confirmation of 
it. 22 Those who think that a man believes what he wishes to 
believe, should observe this case. He says, for instance, "If a 
demon should slip into your loneliest solitude some day or 
night and should say to you: This life, as you are now living 
and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumera- 
ble times, and nothing new will arise in it . . . should you not 
fling yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon 
that so spoke?" 23 He makes Zarathustra say, "Ah, man comes 
back again, ever comes back! the small man ever comes back! 
All too small even the greatest — and unceasing return even of 
the smallest! Ah, horror, horror, horror!" 24 The idea is like 
a serpent, which crawls into a shepherd's throat unawares as 
he lies on the ground and threatens to choke him. 25 The first- 

21 Zarathustra, III, xiii, § 2. 

22 See Lou Andreas-Salom6, op. cit., p. 222; Drews, op. cit., p. 325. 

23 Joyful Science, §341. 

24 Zarathustra, III, xiii, § 2. 

25 Ibid. % III, ii, § 2. 



170 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

quoted passage continues, " every pain and every pleasure, and 
every thought and sigh, and everything unspeakably small and 
great in your life must come back to you, and in the same order 
and succession — and even so this spider and this moonlight 
between the trees, even so this moment and I myself. The 
eternal hour-glass of existence is ever again turned, and you 
with it — dust of dust." It is an almost "spectral" impression 
we get (to use Professor Riehl's adjective), 26 and the undertone 
of feeling is manifest. If this is to be called immortality, it is 
immortality of a new kind, as Riehl observes, 27 for it is only this 
present life, petty and pitiable as it may be, over again. It is 
possible to despair at such a prospect. "We know that a future 
life has sometimes been dreaded rather than welcomed — for 
example, among the Buddhists; and this would seem to be 
another instance. Mr. Henry L. Mencken pronounces Nietz- 
sche's idea "the most hopeless idea, perhaps, ever formulated 
by man." 28 

And yet Nietzsche learned how to right himself in this as 
in other emergencies. Amor fati! If something had to be, it 
could be endured — and must be made endurable. And much, 
he saw, depends upon the nature and character of our life. If 
the recurrence of it is a forbidding thought, is it not because 
our life has failed to satisfy us, has been unworthy, or full of 
pain, or at best commonplace — so that we want no more of it? 
But if it has been a happy life, or at least if there have been 
supreme moments of happiness in it, if we have known for 
however brief a time some great measureless satisfaction of 
our whole being, the situation changes. While suffering we do 
not wish again (at least for its own sake), not so with joy. 
Nietzsche puts the thought in poetic form — it is Zarathustra 's 
song: 

" man ! mark well ! 
What saith deep midnight with its knell? 
' I've slept my sleep — 
And wakened from the dream's deep spell: 
The world is deep 
And deeper than the day can tell. 



28 



Cf. another description no less spectral in Zarathustra, III, ii, § 2. 

Op. tit., pp. 136-7. 

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (2d ed.), p. 260. 



THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 171 

Deep is its woe — 

But joy's more deep than misery; 

Woe saith : " 0, go ! " 

But all joy seeks eternity — 

Seeks the deep, deep eternity/ n 29 d 



That in this human life of ours there may be joy and that it 
may transcend woe, is Nietzsche 's faith. But it is a joy which 
he conceives after his own fashion. The root of his misery lay 
in a sense of the lack of the great, the Divine in the world. 
It was the commonplaceness, the smallness, the meaninglessness 
of life that preyed on him. In the decay of ancient religion, 
heaven and hell are no longer felt as supreme issues among us ; 
and aims of comfort, pleasure, and success, such as most men 
lose themselves in, could not satisfy him. But the question arose, 
granting that the great and Divine do not exist, whether now 
or by any necessity in the future, might they not exist — might 
they not be created ? Might not life then get a meaning even if 
of itself it had none — with a sublime possibility like this before 
it? Even to turn one's thought that way, even only to 
expect the outcome, though the consummation itself was 
far away, could give joy. Such at least was his experi- 
ence, and with this thought and joy he could confront 
a recurrence of his life, dreaded as it might otherwise be. 
The day and hour when all this stood luminously before him 
became memorable — even the particular spot he was in, near 
a boulder in the woods of the Upper Engadine, "6000 ft. 
above the sea, and far higher above all human things"; 30 
it was an " immortal" moment, as he afterward noted 
down. 31 e 

In other words, the thought of recurrence gives rise to a 
practical ethical problem. The task being to "endure our im- 
mortality," the problem is, how to live so that we shall "wish 
to live again." "When thou incorporatest the thought of 
thoughts within thee, it will transform thee. The question in 
connection with all thou doest, 'is it something that I wish to 

29 Zarathustra, III, xv, §3; IV, xix, §12 (the translation is by 
Thomas Common ) . 

30 Werke, XII, 425; cf. Ecce Homo, III, vi, § 1. 

31 Werke, XII, 371, § 731; Ecce Homo, III, vi, § 1. 



172 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

do innumerable times?' is the greatest determinant." 32 "Not 
to look for distant, unknown bliss and blessing and mercy, but 
so to live that we shall wish to live again and to live in the 
same way eternally ! — our task comes to us in every instant. ' ' 33 
The sort of life which made Nietzsche wish to live again we 
have just seen. Life was welcome, would be ad infinitum, when 
lit up with a thought like that described — when a vision of the 
Divine opened out to it. "God," in the permissible sense of 
that term, was just the maximal epoch or state of the develop- 
mental process, and the general course of existence was a making 
and unmaking of the Divine. 34 He particularly notes, in speak- 
ing of propagating the idea of "recurrence," that the outlook 
on the superman and the ethical legislation which naturally 
accompanies it, must come first — and then the doctrine of recur- 
rence, "now endurable!" 35 

This thought of a possible sublime result compensated for 
all that was untoward, pitiful, or commonplace in life — yes, 
compensated for its recurrence also. For such is the connection 
and reciprocal dependence of things, that the great and the 
little, the good and the bad, must go together — as now, so in 
the future. If one moment of a man's life returns, the others 
must too. If we wish a single experience over again, we must 
wish all the rest. 36 "It is absolutely not the first question 
whether we are content with ourselves, but rather whether we 
are content with anything. For if we consent to a single mo- 
ment, we have thereby consented not only to ourselves, but to 
all existence. For nothing stands by itself, whether in our- 
selves or in the world at large; and if only once our soul has 
trembled like a harp with happiness, all eternities were needed 
as a condition of this one happening — and all eternity was in 
this single moment of our consent approved, redeemed, jus- 
tified, and affirmed." 37 From this point of view Zarathustra 
stretches out his hands, so to speak, in blessing on all existence. 
"Pain is also a joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun. 
. . . Say also to woe : go, but come again . . .joy wills the 

32 Werke, XII, 369, § 721; 64-5, §§ 116, 117. 

88 Ibid., XII, 67, § 125. 

84 Will to Power, §§ 639, 712; cf. Werke, XI, 309, § 396. 

85 Werke, XIV, 265, §21; cf. Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 487. 

89 Werke, XII, 370, §§ 724-5. 
87 Will to Power, § 1032. 



THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 173 

eternity of all things. " ffl It is a kind of theodicy. Nietzsche 
thinks that the doctrine of recurrence redeems us from a sense 
of the transitoriness of life : ' ' I teach you redemption from the 
eternal flux. " 39 " Let us impress the image of eternity on our 
life." he says; 40 and he quotes Dante's line, 

"Come Vuom s'etema . . ." (Inf. XV, 85). 41 

But the eternalization which comes to man comes finally to all 
things. Affirm as he might against Schopenhauer the reality of 
time and change, he felt the poignant elements in those con- 
ceptions, the tears in perishing things, and once gives a moving 
expression of his mood. "That Emperor [referring doubtless 
to Marcus Aurelius] kept continually before his mind the per- 
ishability of all things, so that he might not attach too much 
importance to them and be able to remain at rest. On me this 
perishability has a quite different effect — to me everything 
appears of too much value to be so fleeting : it is as if the most 
precious wines and ointments were poured into the sea. "® In 
repeating the paragraph later, he adds, "My consolation is, that 
everything that was, is eternal : — the sea washes it up again. • ' 43 
The theodicy, if I may so speak of it, covers the whole world, 
and the eternal repetition of it. Yes, in the eternal repetition 
of things he finds an approximation to the old idea of being, 
which, as opposed to change, he had felt obliged to renounce. 
"That everything comes again is the nearest approach of a 
world of becoming to a world of being — summit of the view. ' ' tt 
If time and numerical difference are left out of account, the 
world in its totality — the different successions of the same world 
and also the successions of different worlds — is the same identical 
changeless thing. 

ra 

I have already referred to the contrast between Nietzsche's 
view and the ordinary idea of immortality. The latter presup- 
poses a different life from this one — happier, better. It implies 

39 Zarathustra, IV, xix, §§ 10, 11. * 2 Werke, XII, 162, § 327. 

39 Werke, XII, 369, § 723. 43 Will to Power, § 1065. 

*° Ibid., XII, 66, §124. "Ibid., §617. 
41 Will to Power, § 1002. 



174 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

too the idea that the soul is something distinct and separate 
from the body. But Nietzsche has a physiological, if not ma- 
terialistic view of man — " souls are as mortal as bodies," he says, 
and may even perish "quicker." 45 His "other life" is this 
life over again — a course of evolution exactly like that which 
has produced this life producing it a second time. The very 
solemnity of Nietzsche's ethical injunctions rests on this thought 
of identity. Make this life over, he in effect says, for as you 
make it, it will be eternally. And he thinks that after all there 
are deep instincts binding us to this life. He describes an 
experience which cannot be altogether strange to any of us. 
"You feel that you must take farewell — perhaps soon — and the 
sunset colors of this feeling strike in upon your happiness. 
Note this witness: it signifies that you love life and yourself, 
and indeed life as you have hitherto found it and been shaped 
by it — and that you long for an eternalizing of the same. Non 
alia sed haec vita, sempiterna." Hence the fortifying influ- 
ence which he accredits to his doctrine — for change and death 
"are ever singing their brief song, and with the hearing of the 
first strophe we almost perish of longing at the thought that 
things may be gone forever. ' ' 46 When a man has nothing with 
which to offset this experience — the old religion had its way of 
meeting it — he is inwardly lamed, weakened; he no longer 
schools himself in striving and enduring, wants present enjoy- 
ment, makes things easy for himself. Here is part-explanation, 
Nietzsche thinks, of the secularist tendency (Verweltlichung) 
of our time and of the political and socialistic illusions growing 
out of it — the object is the welfare of the fleeting individual, 
who has no reason for waiting, as men with eternal souls and 
eternal possibilities for growing better had in the past. 47 
Against this whole weakening, laming tendency Nietzsche thinks 
that his doctrine is a counterpoise — it gives weight, dignity, 
yes eternity to life. "This life— thy eternal life." 48 "This 
thought contains more than all religions, which have despised 
this life as something fleeting and have directed men's attention 

45 Zarathustra, III, xiii, 2; prologue, §6. 

48 Both this and the preceding quotations are from Werke, XII, 66, 
§123. 

"Will to Power, §417; Werke, XII, 63-4, §§115-6. 
48 Werke, XII, 67, § 126. 



THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 175 

to an undetermined other life." 49 Nietzsche holds that the old 
Alexandrian culture went to pieces, because with all its dis- 
coveries and love of knowledge, it did not know how to give 
supreme weight to this life, but regarded the beyond as more 
important. 50 f He even thinks that his doctrine is the turning- 
point of history. 51 

The difficulty of course arises (and it is urged by several 
critics), 6 that if our action now fixes so far the character of our 
future existence, it must also be true, according to the terms 
of the theory, that this action is itself determined by what we 
(or our counterparts) have done in an earlier existence, so that 
real self-determination is out of the question. It is a difficulty 
not unlike at bottom that which the Calvinist has in reconciling 
free-will with Divine predestination. Indeed, since the influ- 
ence of our past existence is not direct, but through the medium 
of a set of causes which have been operating through untold 
intervals of time and are now at last the immediate antecedents 
of our present action, the difficulty is the same as that which 
is connected with any kind of determinist view of human con- 
duct. How can I really decide what my action shall be, when 
it is but a link in the general causal chain? Nietzsche does 
not solve the problem, nor does he specially discuss it — but he 
was perhaps not unaware of it, and once makes a remark, which, 
I think, shows how he would have approached it. To the ques- 
tion, "But when all is necessary, how can I decide (verfugen) 
about my actions?" he answers, "Thought and belief are a 
determining influence along with all the other influences that 
press upon you, and are more of an influence than they. You 
say that food, place, air, society change and determine you? 
Now your opinions do it still more, for they determine you to 
this food, place, air, society. When you incorporate in yourself 
the thought of thoughts [eternal recurrence], it will transform 
you." 52 That is, the thought or belief (with which the "I" is 
practically identical) is itself a part of the deterministic chain; 
the causal law is not violated by the seemingly free act. In any 
case Nietzsche is entirely undisturbed by the determinist dif- 
ficulty when it comes to deciding how he is to act, and as little 

tB Ibid., XII, 66-7, § 124. B1 Ibid., XIV, 14; XII, 65, § 120. 

eo J&tU, XII, 67-8, § 127. 62 Ibid., XII, 64, § 117. 



176 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

by the remoter difficulty of a predetermination ages on ages 
ago — and probably Calvinists and determinists in general are 
quite like the rest of us in acting as if they were free from day 
to day now. 11 

That the doctrine of recurrence can withstand criticism, I by 
no means assert. Writers on the whole friendly to Nietzsche 
have criticised it. 1 I am simply endeavoring to set it forth as 
he held it. But it is tolerably evident that it is not an entirely 
fantastic or mystical doctrine. Nietzsche himself was not dog- 
matic about it. One of his critics notes that he simply called it 
"the most scientific of all possible hypotheses" 53 — hypothesis 
then still. He speaks of recurrence as "more probable" than 
non-recurrence. 54 He is even willing to say, "Perhaps it is not 
true; let others wrestle with it." 55j Still he was aware that 
practically speaking, as Bishop Butler has told us, probability 
is the guide of life. Remarking on the effect which repetitions 
in general have (e.g., the seasons, periodic illnesses, waking and 
sleeping), he says, "If the circular repetition of things is only 
a probability or possibility, even the thought of a possibility 
can agitate and refashion us, not merely actual sensations or 
definite expectations. How has the possibility of eternal damna- 
tion worked on men ! " 56 And yet Nietzsche wanted as much 
proof for his ideas as he could get. Not for nothing was he 
the child of a scientific and experimental age. He even said 
once that he no longer wished to hear of things and questions 
about which experiment was impossible, 57 and we have his 
sister's testimony that he mistrusted all those enraptured and 
extreme states in which people fancy that they "grasp truth 
with their hands." 58 We know that in the winter before the 
thought of eternal recurrence crystalized, he had been reading 
with lively agreement Helmholtz, Wundt (his earlier writings), 
and the mathematician Riemann. 59 Professor Richter even says 
that he worked out his doctrine with the help of three mathe- 

63 Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 64, 
quoting Werke (1st ed. ), XV, 21. 

64 Werke, XII, 56. 
"Ibid., XIV, 295. 

88 Werke, XII, 65, § 119. 
87 Joyful Science, § 51. 

68 Werke (pocket ed.), VI, xvi. 

69 Ibid., VI, xii. 



THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 177 

matical and scientific books, which he specifies. 60 We know also 
that a year after he had made his first fragmentary formulation 
of it, he wished to test and criticise it afresh, and proposed an 
extended course of study at Vienna (or Paris or Munich) — he 
would stop writing for several years, he declared, and begin 
student-life over again. Unhappily (or happily) the plan could 
not be carried out, because of poor health, and particularly the 
state of his eyes. k And yet it must be doubted whether scientific 
and physical studies such as he looked forward to, however 
careful and extended they might be, could ever dispose of ques- 
tions of this far-reaching nature. Professor Fouillee called 
speculations like Nietzsche's "toutes subjectives." 61 The ele- 
ment of truth in the reproach is that in the nature of the case 
they are incapable of scientific verification. How can one by 
experimental investigation decide whether the sum-total of 
force in the universe is finite or infinite? How can there be a 
scientific demonstration of the state of the cosmos billions of 
years ago, or billions of years to come? How can one get 
objective evidence that time is unending or that empty space 
is unreal? How at the very best can we get beyond certain 
necessities of thought, which it is open to any one to pronounce 
"toutes subjectives"? The fact is that probabilities or possi- 
bilities are all we can have in regions like these — and yet must 
we not proceed on probabilities and possibilities in our concrete 
(as opposed to formal) thinking almost everywhere? However 
this may be, Nietzsche never had his years of projected study, 
and never got beyond such fragmentary formulations of his 
doctrine as we have, and the lyrical expression of it in Zara- 
thustra. 



IV 

Nietzsche is commonly taxed with error in claiming to be 
the first to teach the doctrine. Indeed he himself says that it 
might have been taught by Heraclitus — that at least the Stoa, 
which inherited nearly all its fundamental conceptions from 

60 Schmitz-Dumont's Hathematische Elemente der Erkenntnisstheorie, 
the same writer's Die Einheit der Naturkraft, and 0. Caspari's Der 
Zusammenhang der Dinge (Richter, op. cit., p. 278). 

81 Nietzsche et Vlmmoralisme, p. 217. 



178 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

Heraclitus, has traces of it. 621 Something like it appears in 
Holderlin's ' l Empedokles, ' ' in Heine 's Toy age de Munich a 
Genes, in Blanqui's Eternite par les Astres — and, to speak of 
more strictly scientific or philosophical writers, in Julius 
Bahnsen's Zur Philosophic der Geschichte, in Guyau's Vers 
d'un Philosophe, in von Nageli's address before the Congress 
of German Naturalists in Munich, 1878, in Gustave Le Bon's 
L' Homme et les Societes. 63 Professor Meyer even refers to 
Nietzsche's old enemy, von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, as having 
expressed belief in similar "cosmic periods" (in a lecture, 
"Weltperioden"), 6 * and Professor Saintsbury would turn the 
idea into ridicule by calling it "only an echo of the carpenter 
in 'Peter Simple.'" 65 Nietzsche had early referred to the 
Pythagorean view (that under the same constellation of the 
heavenly bodies, the same things would happen on earth), but 
he thought that it savored of astrology and did not take it seri- 
ously. 66 The basis for the charge of error against him is a 
certain passage in Zarathustra — at least I can find nothing 
beyond this. In this passage the animals who attend the 
prophet, and are joyfully welcoming him back to life after an 
illness, divine the meaning of the illness and exclaim, "Sing 
and bubble over, Zarathustra, heal thy soul with new songs, 
that thou mayest endure thy destiny, which was that of no 
one yet. For-thy animals know well, Zarathustra, who thou 
art and must become: behold, thou art the teacher of eternal 
recurrence — that is now thy destiny! That thou must be the 
first to teach this doctrine — how should this great destiny not 
be also thy greatest danger and illness ! " 67 The natural inter- 
pretation here is that Zarathustra is to be the first of a line to 
proclaim the doctrine, with then the dangers and risks of an 
initiator — the thought is rather of the future, than of exclusion 
in relation to the past. But if "first" is taken otherwise and 
implies what the critics assume, the question is, whether in the 
form in which Nietzsche taught the doctrine, it is not new. For 

62 Ecce Homo, III, i, § 3. 

63 See Drews, op. cit., pp 334-5; Fouillee, op. cit., pp. 207-10; Meyer, 
op. cit., p. 464. 

64 Meyer, op. cit., p. 62. 

eB History of Criticism, Vol. Ill, p. 584 n. 

86 " The Use and Harm of History, etc.," sect. 2. 

• T Zarathustra, III, xiii, § 2. 



THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 179 

to him it is bound up with the idea of something superhuman to 
come — only in this shape would he have published it: unre- 
lieved, unrelated in this way, he would probably have allowed 
it to remain in the dark chambers of his own mind. Zara- 
thustra is made to say, "I come again, with this sun, with this 
earth, with this eagle, with this serpent — not to a new life or 
a better life or a similar life; I come again eternally to this 
identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and also in its smallest, 
to teach again the eternal return of all things — to announce to 
men the superman."® The two things — eternal return and 
superman — are interwoven in Nietzsche's mind; and no one, I 
imagine, will claim that this full-orbed view had ever been 
taught before. 

On another point, however, it is difficult to acquit Nietzsche 
of error, and even of a certain naivete. He entertained the idea 
— nay, a.ppears to have been convinced of it — that the doctrine 
would make a veritable selection among men. The weaker, he 
believed, would not be able to stand it, they would be undone 
at the thought of an unending repetition of their pitiful lives, 
and not knowing how, or being without the energy, to transform 
them, they would be driven to despair and suicide. Only the 
strong, the brave, those capable of great things could face the 
doctrine with equanimity, and with this type of men surviving 
and occupying the earth, things would be possible, of which no 
utopist has as yet dreamed. 69 "It is the great disciplinary 
(ziichtende) thought: the races that cannot endure it are 
doomed, those that feel it as the greatest benefit are chosen for 
dominion." 70 But that the relatively unreflecting and unim- 
aginative mass of men are going to be deeply affected by some- 
thing that is to happen to them ages on ages to come is most 
improbable; if they are not driven to suicide now by the char- 
acter of their lot, a prospective renewal of it at some unknown 
time in the future will hardly disturb them much more deeply. 
In truth, Nietzsche, in thinking as he does, transfers to others 
quite different from himself his own imaginative intelligence; 
because he would suffer to despair in their place, he infers that 

88 Ibid., Ill, xiii, § 2. The italics are mine. 

89 Werke, XII, 65-6, § 121; Will to Power, § 55. 
70 Will to Power, § 1053. 



180 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

they must — while it is just because he is so different from them 
that he does so suffer. Unquestionably the view is very real to 
him. He says, ''You fancy that you would have long repose 
before rebirth — but do not deceive yourselves. Between the last 
moment of consciousness and the first appearance of the new 
life, 'no time' intervenes — it is as quickly by as a lightning- 
flash, even if living creatures measure it by billions of years or 
cannot measure it at all. When the mind is away, timelessness 
and succession are compatible with one another." 71 He even 
fancies that the mass may look approvingly on his doctrine at 
the start, since it means immortality of a certain kind and the 
most ordinary impulses of self-preservation will respond to 
it. 72m Equally, he suspects, the finer, nobler spirits will be at 
first depressed and in danger of extirpation (even as he had 
been), leaving the commoner, less sensitive nature to survive 73 — 
a probability the reverse of the view first stated, and, I should 
say, likelier. He is thus not really certain as to what the popular 
effect of his doctrine will be — now he suspects one consequence 
and now another. The only thing we or he can speak with real 
assurance about is its effect on himself — for to him the doctrine 
became something like a religion. 

But if a religion, it is one without the gestures that often 
accompany religion. It is "mild to those who do not believe it; 
it has no hell and no threats — the only result is that one is left 
with a fleeting life in his consciousness." 74 It were horrible to 
think of sin in such a connection; whatever we do, even if we 
repeat it innumerable times, is innocent, and if the thought 
of eternal recurrence does not convince us, there is no blame, 
as there is no merit, if it does. 75 He has no desire that the doc- 
trine should become a religion suddenly — it must sink into 
men's minds slowly; whole generations must work on it — long, 
long must it be small and weak. What are the two millenniums 
during which Christianity has existed — the greatest thought 
will require many millenniums ! 76 He wishes the doctrine stated 

71 WerJce, XII, 66, § 122. 

72 Ibid., XII, 371, §730. 

"Hid., XII, 370, §729; XIV, 264, §15. 

74 Ibid., XII, 68, § 128. 

75 Ibid., XII, 68, § 129. 
"Ibid., XII, 68-9, §130. 






THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 181 

"simply and almost dryly" — it "must not need eloquence to 
commend it. ' ' 77 He wards off followers who believe easily and 
get enthusiastic — they must have passed through every grade 
of skepticism, must have bathed with pleasure in waters icy- 
cold, otherwise they have no inner right to the thought. 78 

The idea of eternal recurrence was very vital to Nietzsche 
for a time ; but, though still held, it seems to have receded some- 
what into the background in his latest years — at least his ethical 
and social views develope quite independently of it, and have 
whatever validity they possess irrespective of it. 

77 Ibid., XII, 69, § 131. 78 Ibid., XII, 69, § 132. 



CHAPTER XV 

ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER ■ 

I have considered Nietzsche's general view of the world and 
of the law of recurrence in it — it remains now to state his con- 
clusions as to its ultimate nature. They were reached (so far 
as they were reached) by a complicated process of arguing 
with himself, which it is not altogether easy to resolve. The 
way is labyrinthine — I have come near being lost in it myself. 
We have only notes preparatory to his final systematic treatise, 
not the treatise itself. I can only give the best results which 
I have been able to attain — perhaps even so I make him more 
consistent than he really was. The essential logic of his pro- 
cedure (I do not mean the temporal order) appears to have 
been something like the following — at least I can best present 
his varying judgments or attributes under these heads: 

(1) The world (the world as we commonly understand it) 
is not real — the world of " science" as little as that of common 
sense. 

(2) We make the world real, i.e., posit it as such, have to 
for life, and none the less delude ourselves. 

(3) Is there any reality? 

(4) Reality conceived as power and will to power. 

i 

The first proposition, the world is not real, is only a restate- 
ment and amplification of the view which was taking shape in 
his first period. The world of colors, sounds, resistances, etc., 
exists only in our mind or feeling. 2 Abstract the sensibilities 
of sentient beings, and it would disappear. We have no reason 
to suppose that our images of tree, stone, water, etc., faithfully 
reflect things outside us. They are our creation, in response to 
stimuli that come to us : to one stimulus we respond with color, 

1 The substance of this chapter appeared in Mind, October, 1915 (Vol. 
XXIV, N. S., No. 96). 

2 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 516, 545. 

182 ' 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 183 

to another with sound, and so on. a We may think that we can 
account for the stimulus by saying that it comes from an object, 
but all the objects we have any acquaintance with are resolvable 
themselves into sensations and groups of sensations like the 
preliminary ones we set out to explain. If we say, for example, 
that green comes from a tree, we soon become aware that the 
tree itself (so far as it is separable from its greenness) is but 
a cluster of other, perhaps more elementary, sensations of the 
same general kind, such as hardness, resistance, pressure, or 
weight. If we abstract from all the sensations, no tree is left. 
As Nietzsche puts it, the known outer world is born after the 
effect, of which it is supposed to be the cause. 3 Our bodies 
themselves are, as we know them, groups of sensations like 
everything else — what they really are in their intimate nature 
we have not the slightest idea. b 

Nor if we consider the more refined world of science, do 
we leave the subjective sphere. The world of atoms and their 
movements, which physicists conceive of as a true world in 
contrast with the ordinary world of sense-perception, is not 
essentially different from the ordinary world; its molecules or 
atoms are only what we should see or handle had we finer 
senses, — they and their movements are entirely of a sensational 
nature. 4 Moreover, the supposition that there are ultimate, 
indivisible, unalterable units like molecules or atoms is pure 
invention ; it is convenient to have them for purposes of reckon- 
ing, and, as we do not find them, we proceed to create them — 
this is all we can say. 5c Mechanics is purely a practical or 
regulative science. 6 (I may remark in passing that Nietzsche 
thinks that the Dalmatian Boscovitch put an end to materialistic 
atomism, as the Pole Copernicus had done to the notion of a 
fixed earth). 7 It is the same with " force" or "forces," in the 
purely mechanical sense. We know only effects — no one has 
ever got hold of a force, as mechanical philosophy pictures it. 
Force, in this sense, is really a piece of abstraction, a more or 
less arbitrary creation. We ourselves have a certain feeling of 

3 Ibid., § 479. 

4 Ibid., § 636. 

6 Ibid., § C24. 

8 Cf. WerJce, XII, 33, §63; XIV, 45, §83; also p. 325. 

7 Beyond Good and Evil, § 12. 



184 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

force (of tension, of overcoming opposition) in muscular ex- 
ertion, and the physicist proceeds to take this force apart from 
the consciousness and feeling that it is and all its human accom- 
paniments and to put it into the external world — really there 
it is an empty word. 8 Similarly fictitious are the purely 
mechanical push and pull, attraction and repulsion, imagined to 
exist between the atoms. Without an aim, an attraction or a 
repulsion is an unintelligible thing. The will toward something 
and to get it into our power, or against something to repel it, 
is something we can understand; but the physicist's "attrac- 
tion" and ■ 'repulsion" are words simply. 9 So as to necessity 
in the world : we put it there — we add it to the facts, for, because 
something acts definitely and always so acts, it does not follow 
that it is forced to. 10 Equally mythological are the laws which 
things are supposed to obey. 11 Sometimes scientific men give 
up attempts at explaining things, and content themselves with 
description — reducing phenomena perhaps to mathematical 
terms, and causality to relations of equivalence between them; 
but this mathematizing of things brings us no nearer objective 
reality, perhaps takes us further away from it — the abstract 
quantities and their relations being still essentially sensible 
things, though eviscerated and ghost-like forms of them. 12d 

Although Nietzsche does not question the reality of the psy- 
chological world itself, he finds that fictitious elements are more 
or, less introduced here. A subject, for example, in the sense 
of 1 something added to the feelings and thoughts themselves, is 
fictitious. He criticises "I think," suggesting that "it thinks" 
would be a more proper expression, but adding that the "it," 
too, must in the end go: there is no "I" or "it" separate from 
the thinking — no constant unchanging reality of that sort. 13e 

8 Will to Power, §§619-21, 551. 

9 Cf. ibid., §§ 622, 627. 

10 Ibid., § 552. 

11 Ibid., §§ 629, 630; cf. Mixed Opinions etc., § 9; Werke, XII, 30, § 56. 

12 Cf. Joyful Science, §373; Werke (pocket ed.), VIII, x; Will to 
Power, §§ 554, 618. I need scarcely add that explaining and compre- 
hending things is not a problem that Nietzsche thinks can be put to one 
side; cf. the implications of Will to Power, §§624-8; Beyond Good and 
Evil, § 14; Werke, XIII, 82-4. He can only say that phenomena them- 
selves cannot be causes ( Will to Power, § 545 ) . 

13 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §§16, 17, 54; Will to Power, §§481, 
488; Werke, XI, 185, §76. 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 185 

A "substance" of mind goes in the same way; 14f indeed the 
body comes nearer to being a substantial reality than the mind, 
though to neither is "substance" really applicable. 15 

In the same way "things," as any wise distinct from their 
attributes or activities, are not real; object taken as a "thing" 
is no more real than subject, matter no more real than mind. 16 
A "thing" is only a certain sum of activities bound together 
by a concept or image. "Things," "objects," "subjects," 
"substance," "ego," "matter" are the metaphysics of the 
people, by which they seek to transcend the shifting realm of 
change, alone directly known to us ; they want something perma- 
nent and this is the way they get it: but the entities are ficti- 
tious, imaginary. 

Hence, in general, the world we commonly picture is a false 
one, not real: we fancy that it exists quite independently of 
us, that we simply find it — and we are mistaken. We may 
correct our images in this way and that, may make one inter- 
pretation of the world succeed another, but we do not get 
beyond images and interpretations : the original data in the case 
are a meager quantity, and even they are not reality itself (in 
the independent sense), but the way or ways in which reality 
affects us. 17 g 

ii 

Second, we make fhe world real, i.e., hold it so, do so the 
better to live, and none the less delude ourselves. The under-^ 
lying thought is that life, uncertain and changing as it is, needs 
something on which to stay itself; with this it walks more 
securely, has greater confidence. 18 We assume that what we need- 
exists, and, by a subtle process of self-deception, transfer some 
of our experiences into an objective and supposably unchanging 
world. As Nietzsche puts it, we project our conditions of 

14 Will to Power, § 552; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 12. 

15 Cf. Zarathustra, I, iv. Nietzsche finds two elements in the notion 
"substance," on the one hand, the idea of something permanent (see, 
e.g., Werke, XII, 33, §62), on the other that of a subject (ibid., XV, 1st 
ed., 281), so that if "subject" disappears as without scientific warrant, 
" substance " must also. 

16 Will to Power, §§ 551-2. 

'"Ibid., §§12 (A), 522, 542, 602, 604, 616. 
18 Cf. ibid., § 552d. 



186 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

maintenance, and turn them into predicates of existence. 19 We 
convert trees and stones and stars into independent realities and 
feel thereby at ease and secure. And when science comes with 
its analysis and makes us aware that these sensible objects 
cannot exist just as they appear, the same feeling and craving 
leads us to form (or to acquiesce in the effort of science to 
form) the idea of elementary kinds of matter, molecules, atoms, 
or what not, that do not have these palpable subjective refer- 
ences. Indeed, practical need plays no small part in determining 
our beliefs in general. For example, experience gives us a whole 
host of particulars — how shall we get on with them? If every- 
thing is particular, and nothing like another, how can we know 
what to expect and how to act? Accordingly we classify the 
particulars or try to, make groups of them, so far as they have 
points of resemblance, say, this is the same as that — and reason 
and act accordingly. But there is no real identity in the world, 
and a purely theoretic instinct never would have come on such 
a notion: our ordinary reasoning and logic are but a rough 
rule of thumb. 20 h So practical need, rather than theoretical 
interest, determines the common ideas of causality, substance, 
subject, ego, being as opposed to becoming, also the ordinary 
articles of religious faith and conceptions like desert and guilt 
— they are useful to man and society, therefore we hold them 
valid and true. 21 Christianity, Nietzsche observes, is necessary 
to most in old Europe now, and a religious doctrine may be 
refuted a thousand times, but if necessary, man will still hold to 
it. 22 So valuations of things are necessary to life, and under 
the workings of similar impulses and by a similar self-deception 
we put good and bad into things, making them intrinsic there, 
though as matter of fact all values are of our positing and repre- 
sent simply conditions of our self-preservation. 23 

In other words, a large range of belief and even of so-called 
" knowledge" has nothing to do with truth and never came from 
the search for it. 1 Nietzsche remarks that those who urge 

18 Ibid., § 507. 

20 Cf. Will to Power, §§423, 515, 610; Beyond Good and Evil, §191. 

21 Cf. Will to Power, §497 (as to causality) ; § 513 (as to substance, 
subject, etc.) ; §354 (as to religious errors). 

22 Joyful Science, § 347. 

23 See later, p. 218. 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 187 

strictly scientific methods of thinking have the whole pathos of 
mankind against them. 24 And so far does he go in sympathy 
with " mankind " that he is ready to say that if a choice has to 
be made between truth and the requirements of life, the require- 
ments of life should come first. Why may not illusions be 
allowed to stand, he virtually asks, — on what ground do we say 
that truth has the greater right to be ? He is the first thinker, 
to my knowledge, to turn truth itself into a problem. 25 He 
criticises truth for truth's sake as much as art for art's sake or 
the good for the good's sake, 26 saying that those who, instead of 
valuing these things from the standpoint of life, make them 
supreme over life, are only logical as they postulate another 
world than this one, since here truth, science at any cost, may 
be inconsistent with life and an absolute will to truth may be a 
hidden will to death. 27 Knowledge (in the strict sense) may 
actually not be desirable for most, 3 the world as we picture and 
conceive it under the stress of life's needs may be better than 
the world as it really is 28 — our ignorance, even a will to 
ignorance, may be expedient for us. 29 k 

So keenly does Nietzsche feel all this, that for a moment he 
is willing to revise his idea of truth. Wishing to keep the word 
in its customary honorific sense, he says, let us agree to desig- 
nate as truth what furthers life and elevates the type of man. 30 
As he once puts it paradoxically (mingling the two meanings 
of truth in the same sentence), truth is the kind of error without 
which a definite type of human being could not live. 311 He 
tries valiantly to keep to this new definition. 32 And yet the 
settled uses of languages prove too much for him and we find 

2 * Will to Power, § 469. 

25 Genealogy of Morals, III, § 24. The very reverence for truth is 
partly the result of illusion, i.e., of thinking that the values which we 
put into existence are there independently of us. 

26 Will to Power, § 298. 

27 Joyful Science, §344; cf. Will to Power, §608. 

28 Joyful Science (preface of 1886); cf. §§54, 299, 301, 344; Gene- 
alogy etc., Ill, §24; Will to Power, §§583, 598 ("the truth is ugly"); 
Joyful Science, § 107 ("our final gratitude to art"). 

29 Will to Power, § 609. 

30 Ibid., § 51 ; cf. Werke, XII, 209, § 442. 

81 Will to Power, §493; cf. Werke (pocket ed.), VII, xviii ("knowl- 
edge is error that becomes organic and organizes"). 

32 In accordance with it he even speaks at times of " creating " truth 
(cf. Will to Power, § 552). 



188 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

liim continually relapsing into the ordinary methods of speech. 
He says time and again that the necessities of life prove nothing 
as to truth. Schematizing for purposes of practical control he 
still specifically distinguishes from knowing. 33 Is it really 
knowing a thing, he asks, to class it with something else with 
which one is already familiar and so find it less strange? — this 
when both alike may be unknown, the things we are most 
familiar with being sometimes the least known, inasmuch as they 
excite no curiosity and we fancy we know them already. 34 Com- 
prehending, explaining, understanding — that alone fills out 
Nietzsche 's idea of knowing; and classifying, not to say math- 
ematizing, only touches the borders of the subject. 121 That a 
belief is convenient, practical, even necessary, proves nothing 
as to its standing in foro scientice. The law of causality, for 
example, may, like other so-called a priori truths, be so much 
a part of us that unbelief in it would cause our undoing — is 
it therefore true? As if truth were proved by our remaining 
alive! 35 The idea of an "ego" may be indispensable, and for 
all that be a fiction. 36 The ideas of a given type of being simply 
prove what is necessary for it, and the ideas may vary as the 
types vary. The Euclidean space may, like our kind of reason, 
foe simply an idiosyncrasy of certain kinds of animals — other 
Trinds might find necessary a space of four dimensions and have 
a different type of logic from the human. 37 So with valuations. 
The valuations of one species, being from the standpoint of its 
particular interests, may differ from those of another species, 
the interests of which are different; or, if the ruling impulses 
vary, differing estimations of ends and means, different inter- 
pretations of historical events, different world-perspectives gen- 
erally may result. 38 n It is naive to take man as the measure of 
things, either theoretically or practically. 39 We do not know 

**Will to Power, §515; cf. WerJce, XIII, 52, §123. 
34 Joyful Science, §355; cf. Will to Power, §479. 
30 Will to Power, § 497. 

88 Ibid., § 483. Cf. in general as to most indispensable judgments 
being at the same time false, Beyond Good and Evil, § 4 (also Werke, 
XIV, 16, §24). 

37 Will to Power, § 515; Werke (pocket ed.), VIII, x. Nietzsche even 
has critical reflections on the " law of non-contradiction " ( Will to Power, 
§§515-6). 

38 Will to Power, §§ 567, 481, 605. 

89 Cf . Dawn of Day, § 483 ; Joyful Science, § 249 ; Beyond Good and 
Evil, §3; Will to Power, § 12 (B). 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 189 

but that some beings might experience time backwards, or for- 
wards and backwards alternately, whence would result other 
directions of life and other conceptions of cause and 
effect than those with which we- are familiar. It is a 
hopeless curiosity, indeed, to wish to see round our corner, 
but Nietzsche thinks or hopes that at least we are modest 
enough not to claim that our perspective is the only 
one. He even says that by reflections such as these the world 
becomes infinite to him again, i.e., capable of an infinite variety 
of interpretations, — though he has no notion of worshiping the 
new infinity, since it may include undiv'me interpretations as 
well as the other kind. 40 All the interpretations may be justified 
relatively to those who make them, and none have strictly ob- 
jective warrant. But then the question arises (and this is the 
third point) : — 

in 

Are there any objective things, is there any reality (in the 
independent sense) at all? Nietzsche may have wavered here 
at times — in any case his language is not always consistent. Still 
two things stand out with tolerable distinctness. One is, that 
his very language about falsehood, error, illusion, indicate that 
in the background of his mind lurks the idea of something or 
other, the knowledge of which would be truth. Indeed he ex- 
plicitly says as much — as, for example, in speaking of the possi- 
bility that the "real make-up" (wahre Beschaffenheit) of things 
may be so harmful to life, so opposed to its presuppositions, 
that illusion is needed to make life possible. 41 He even uses 
Kantian and Schopenhauerian language at times, speaking of 
the "intelligible character" of the world, i.e., the world "seen 
from within." 42 Zarathustra is described as willing to see "the 
ground of all things" and the ultimate ground. 430 The other 
thing is the practically constant recognition of an original 
mass or chaos of sensations. They are indeed our creation, but 

40 Joyful Science, §374. 

41 Will to Power, §583 (A). 

42 Beyond Good and Evil, § 386. In Will to Power, § 516, the ques- 
tion is raised whether the axioms of logic are adequate to the real or can 
even give us the idea of it. 

43 Zarathustra, III, 1. 



190 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

in response to stimuli — and the stimuli Nietzsche distinctly does 
not contemplate as self-generated. p They do not come from 
the outer word as we picture it, for this is an after-product of 
the sensations themselves; all the same we "receive" them, and 
Nietzsche is inevitably driven to ask, whence ? ** 

The idea of reality outside us is thus inexpugnable to him. 
What it is, what its constitution, is another matter. It is not 
this familiar world of common sense; it is not the world of 
atoms and denatured "forces" of popular science; nor is it 
the world of purely quantitative and mathematical relations of 
refined science. Still more, it is not a world of "things-in- 
themselves," as this phrase is often bandied about by philo- 
sophical writers who think to refute Kant by showing that the 
idea of things out of any kind of relation is absurd; neither 
Kant nor any other realist worth mentioning has ever meant 
by independent reality that. Things are always in relation — 
and when conceived of (if they can be conceived of) as isolated, 
they are a pure invention of the mind, an illusion. 45 Most em- 
phatically it is not a world of pure and changeless being such 
as Schopenhauer dreamed of. That being changes is our 
ground-certainty about it. 46 Schopenhauer's other world is the 
product of a mind ill at ease in the order of change and suffering 
we know and conjuring up another order for its relief, i.e., it is 
the offspring of subjective need, and Nietzsche distrusts (at 
least for his own account) constructions that come from any 
other need or impulse than the theoretic or knowing one itself. 47 
Even moral needs are no safe basis for construction, not to 
speak of the needs of happiness, comfort, or inspirations 

What is left, then? one may ask. There is evidence that 
Nietzsche was for a time in sore perplexity. The very extreme 
of skepticism and uncertainty as to both metaphysics and morals 
is pictured in "The Shadow" in Thus spake Zarathustra — 

44 Cf. Will to Power, § 569 (the ambiguity in this passage turns 
about the term " things," which Nietzsche, as we have seen, regards as 
a subjective fiction; but that we are to a certain extent passive and 
acted upon is implied throughout). 

45 Nietzsche makes a running fire on both "things in themselves" 
and " things," sometimes misconstruing what Kant meant by the former 
himself (ibid., §§552-9; cf. §473; Joyful Science, §354). 

46 Werke, XII, 23, § 39. 

47 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 708, 585, 576. 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 191 

Nietzsche had been that shadow and had said to himself in bitter 
irony: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted. 48 r There is 
nothing in things that we have not put into them, science, too, 
being this sort of child's play. 49 We can conceive only a world 
that we ourselves have made — if it appears logical, it is because 
we have logicized it. 50 There are no facts, only interpretations ; 
we cannot fix any fact in itself — perhaps it is absurd to wish 
to. 513 We have no organ for knowing [in the strict theoretic 
sense, erkennen], we know ["wissen," oder glauben oder bilden 
uns ein] only what is useful for our human herd or species — 
and even as to this utility we only have a belief, cherish an 
imagination, and perhaps a stupid one with which we shall 
sometime perish. 52 Such are some of the extreme expressions 
of his despairing mood. And it must be admitted that along 
the ordinary lines of objective search and analysis Nietzsche 
finds no way of meeting the skepticism. Though he has the 
general idea of objective reality, he cannot give any content to 
it. Though he recognizes certain primitive data of sensation (or 
rather of stimulation), these data are so primitive, so far away 
from anything like our actual world in which data and inter- 
pretation are inextricably combined, that. they might almost as 
properly be designated by an x or an interrogation mark as the 
original realities themselves. What Nietzsche really now does 
is to view the whole problem from a new angle. And here I 
pass to the fourth point : — 

IV 

Reality as power and will to power. Some of the steps by 
which he reached this conception seem to be these: (1) It came 
over him at times that his fellow-men were different from 
things in general. Thoroughgoing idealism is necessarily 
solipsistic. If we — each of us — think that nothing exists out- 
side our sensations and thoughts, then our fellow-beings exist 
only in our sensations and thoughts, i.e., have no independent 
being of their own; and though this might not matter greatly, 

48 Zarathustra, IV, ix; cf. Genealogy etc., Ill, §24. 

49 Will to Power, §606; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §21. 
*°Will to Power, §§495, 521. 

81 Ibid., §481. 

02 Joyful Science, § 354. 



192 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

so far as each other 's bodies are concerned, every one would 
probably feel that to make his thinking or feeling dependent 
upon the thinking and feeling of another was absurd — indeed, 
no clear-headed person will assert that he feels another's feeling 
or can, or that another can feel his (we can only reconstruct 
one another's feelings and feel them in imagination, and the 
same is true of thoughts). Opposed as Nietzsche was in a 
general way to the idea of "another world," a "transcendent 
world," he came to see that, strictly speaking, other souls were 
themselves another world, a transcendent world, and he makes 
Zarathustra say so. 53 Once he formally argues the matter : ' ' For 
a single man the [independent] reality of the world would be 
without probability, but for two it becomes probable. That is, 
the other man is an imagination of ours, entirely our 'will,' 
our 'idea': and we are again the same in him. But because 
we know that he deceives himself about us [in thinking that we 
are simply his imagination] and that we are a reality despite 
the phantom-picture of us which he carries in his head, we 
conclude that he too is a reality despite our imagination of 
him: in short, that realities outside us exist." 54 (2) Another 
line of reflection came to him: Although distinguishing abso- 
lutely between "true" and "false" in the world at large is 
a difficult and perhaps impossible thing, setting up an end 
ourselves and trying to make thinks go that way is another 
matter — and it is what every strong man does to a greater or 
lesser extent, indeed, what practically every one tries to do. 55 
The very arranging, classifying, interpreting, valuing of the 
world and of things in it, about the objective validity of which 
Nietzsche is in doubt, is an incident to this end. The most 
wonderful of all things is not the world in its mystery, or the 
truths or values about which we dispute, but what is immediate 
and best proved, our own willing, valuing, creative selves. 56 
The extraordinary turn is accordingly made that the factor the 
action of which breeds skepticism as to our possession of ob- 
jective truth, viz., our will to power and exercise of it, is that 
about which skepticism is impossible; the very changing of 

53 Zarathustra, I, iii; III, xii, §4; xiii, §2. 
Si Werke, XI, 180, § 68. 
65 Cf. Will to Power, § 605. 
8 8 Zarathustra, I, iii. 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 193 

things which it works, a change so complete that we hardly 
know whether any of the original lineaments of things are left, 
is a proof of its reality. 57 

Here then is something to start with. Nietzsche feels this 
power in himself and thinks that it is really the bottom thing 
in him ; and as he is not solipsist, he thinks that there are similar 
centers of power in other men. And turning his thought to the 
world at large, the question arises, may not animals and plants 
and even insensate things be centers of power in varying meas- 
ures and ways? May not the world in its real being be made 
up, not of "things," substances, subjects, egos, atoms, causes 
and effects, spatial quantities and movements, but of these centers 
of power more or less conflicting and struggling with one an- 
other ? 58 1 Each being a will to power seeks to prevail, and is 
only prevented by others which want to do the same ; each esti- 
mates all that is outside from its own standpoint, and to the 
extent it is conscious, builds up a world accordingly — images, 
concepts, categories, and all; each is real and its created world 
is real (at least, till another center of power puts an end to 
one or the other or both), and this is what and all that reality 
means." The question as to the truth of the estimates or images 
or concepts, save as it is a question of what each can make good 
or can successfully act by, is irrelevant and without meaning, 
since estimations, images, concepts only exist in relation to the 
power which creates them and seeks to effectuate itself by their 
aid. Sensations, or rather the stimuli to which we react with 
sensations, become then construable, as a part of the effect which 
some outside center of power makes upon us — it is a kind of 
signal that another power is there. By the sensations, the 
memories we keep of them, and the ordered picture of the world 
we draw up, we know a little better how to act in relation to 
these unseen friends or foes. It is, however, only in the initial 
semi-physical contact that we are in direct, first-hand relation 
to them, and our sensations themselves need not have the slight- 
est resemblance to the original realities. 59 v 

67 "The 'falseness' in things is to be explained as result of our 
creative force ! " ( Werke, XIV, 269, § 39 ) . 

68 Cf. Will to Power, §635 (not things, but dynamic quantities, in 
relations of tension to one another, their essence consisting in the rela- 
tions, in the mutual interaction). 

69 Cf. Ibid., § 569. 



194 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 



Such is the construction which Nietzsche offers in its most 
general terms. It is an hypothesis purely — he so speaks of it. 60 
To take it as a dogma is to misconceive it and miss its value 
(whatever value it has). It is something to mull over — and 
then to accept or no according as it seems to cover the ground 
and meet theoretic requirements. (Other requirements have to 
be left out of account by one who takes up the problem in Nietz- 
sche 's spirit.) I shall be content in what follows if I can make 
the hypothesis reasonably clear. 

In the first place, "will to power' ' is a theoretic proposi- 
tion. By many it is taken as an ethical standard (and rather 
a brutal one) ; but primarily it is with Nietzsche an analysis 
or interpretation of reality — a view as to its last elements. 61 
Secondly, it is manifest that it is not merely power on a 
physical level that is in his mind ; indeed, it may be questioned 
whether the discovery that instincts of power lie behind a large 
range of mental operations and also play an important part in 
the varying moralities of men, did not contribute as much as 
anything else to .the formation of the view. Further, the view 
is relatively new in his intellectual history. It is, in a sense, 
metaphysical and stands in contrast with the purely critical and 
positivistic attitude of his middle period. 62 Then he had spoken 
of the idea that will is the essence of things as "primitive 
mythology" ; w now he is ready to argue from analogy, and 
frankly takes man as his starting-point. 63 One might almost call 
it a return to the metaphysics of his first period, except that 
now he is less assured of the subjectivity of space and time 
(time at least he asserts to be objective), and the will is many, 
not one — the Primal Will (Urwille), that eases itself of its pain 
by looking at itself objectively and so creating the world, being 
left out of account. The view might be described as Pluralistic 
Voluntarism. 1 The question of the origin of the many wills is 

eo Ibid., § 869. 

81 Nietzsche's projected book had originally as its full title Der Wille 
zur Macht, eine Auslegung alles Geschehens (Werke, pocket ed., IX, xiii. ). 

02 See Lou Andreas-Salome"'s apt remarks on this subject (op. cit., 
p. 139). 

63 Will to Power, § 619. 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 195 

not even raised — so that, if Schopenhauer's system is meta- 
physics in the second or highest degree, Nietzsche's is so only 
in the first ; M still it is metaphysics so far as this means a 
transcending of experience and the phenomenal realm in 
general. Certain positivist writers regard Nietzsche as going 
backward — reversing in his procedure Comte's law of the three 
stages. 65 

The starting-point is, as I have said, man. The bottom 
thing in him is his impulsive, willing nature. Each impulse, 
indeed, would rule if it could — the human problem being to 
establish an order of rank or precedence between them. Mind 
itself is of a commanding nature — wants to rule. 66 Philosophy, 
which seeks to arrange, grasp, comprehend the world and estab- 
lish values in it, is the most sublimated form of the will to 
power. 67 One who thinks that philosophy has nothing to do 
with power should grapple with a philosophical problem, or 
with Nietzsche himself — and see whether power is needed. 
Nietzsche regards the scientific specialist as a tool — a precious 
one, one of the most precious that exists — but a tool in the hands 
of one more powerful than he, the philosopher. The philosopher 
is the Caesarian trainer and strong man of culture. 68 The saint 
is interpreted in similar terms. He is commonly thought .to 
turn his back on power, but he is a supreme type of power, and 
of the will to it, according to Nietzsche. He is revered by the 
mightiest — why? Because, Nietzsche answers, they feel in 
presence of one of their own kind — whose power, however, turns 
inward rather than outward. 69 Even love is an exercise of 
power — it gives the highest feeling of power; and Jesus, in 
telling his disciples to call no one master, really recommended 
a very proud life under the form of a poor and serving one. 70 
Nietzsche thinks that the sense of power ' is what in varying 
form we all crave, that the love of power is a central, universal 
instinct : he defines psychology as a doctrine of the development 

84 This is the distinction made by Richter, op. cit., p. 283. 

85 Zoccoli, Lasserre, and others, as reported by Mtigge, Friedrich 
Nietzsche: His Life and Work (3d ed.), p. 316. 

68 Beyond Good and Evil, §§6, 230. 
"Ibid., §§9, 211. 

88 Ibid., § 207. 

89 Cf. ibid., § 51. 

70 Will to Power, §§ 176, 169. 



196 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

of the will to power and of the forms it takes. 71 Such is his 
analysis of human nature. 

But the driving force which he finds in us, he thinks he sees 
traces of, though in simpler form, in the lower ranges of life. 
Indeed in ourselves it is something more elemental than con- 
scious choice or than consciousness itself. It becomes conscious 
on occasion, but itself lies deeper, and in a more or less un- 
conscious form Nietzsche imagines that it exists in animals and 
plants, and indeed wherever there is activity/ He does not 
attempt to demonstrate this inference — he attempts no demon- 
stration even of the primacy of will in man, he has not unsaid 
his old criticism of Schopenhauer to the effect that we have no 
real first-hand knowledge of will : 72 it is all, whether as regards 
man or as regards lower beings, hypothesis, a view without 
pretense to certainty, speculation, as perhaps any kind of meta- 
physics must be. 

VI 

Let me give the interpretation in still further detail — be- 
ginning with the lowest forms of existence. 73 Physical motion, 
for example, is a subjective phenomenon — an alteration in our 
sensations: the reality in the case is a change in the relations 
of two or more centers of power — a change that is symbolically 
revealed to us, being translated into the sign-language of eye 
and touch. 74 The world of mechanics in general is sign-language 
[unmeaning and unexistent apart from us or beings like us] 
for will-quanta struggling with one another, some perhaps tem- 
porarily overcoming [which are real, quite independent of us]. 75 
The unintelligible ' 'forces/' " attractions, ' ' and ''repulsions" 
which physicists speak of get concreteness and meaning, con- 
strued as kindred to impulses in ourselves; they reach out to 
control or they repel foreign control much as we do. 76 The same 

71 " Morphologie und Entwicklungslehre des Willens zur Macht" 
(Beyond Good and Evil, § 23). 

72 He rather reasserts it {Will to Power, §§475-8). Richter, op. cit., 
p. 274, comments on the difficulty presented by these varying views. 

78 Cf. the language of Will to Power, § 712. 

74 Will to Power, §§ 625, 634, 689 (motion eine Bilderrede, mechanics 
eine blosse Semiotik ) . 
76 Ibid., § 680. 
70 Ibid.. § 619. 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 197 

may be said of chemical action and reaction, which are always 
of a specific character — the element of preference or choice 
[according to the nature of the elements in question] cannot be 
left out of account in explaining them. 77 "Qualities" are the 
expression [sensations in us] of definite kinds of action and 
reaction, and Nietzsche suggests that quantity may be the out- 
come of quality [of the objective counterpart of quality] — the 
center of power wishing to become more, to grow, to attain 
greater size. 78 z Causality appears in a new light. How, we ask, 
can two contrasted things, such as mind or will in us and an 
object outside us, affect one another? Nietzsche's view makes 
them fundamentally alike — will acts on will everywhere, not on 
something foreign to it. 79 Moreover, causality is not so much a 
relation of succession, as a working in and upon one another of 
two powers or wills, with its natural and inevitable result, either 
of a compromise, or of conquest on one side and subjection on 
the other. There is no cause and effect in the sense of an ante- 
cedent and consequent, nor is there a transference of energy 
from one thing to another, but rather a measuring up of forces 
against one another and a result — and this is why cause and 
effect, as ordinarily conceived, are rated a fiction, equally with 
" substance,' ' "atom," and the rest. 80 Further, the ordinary 
idea of causality is of an unending process of change, an effect 
once reached becoming the cause of another effect and so on. 
But why, Nietzsche asks, need this be so, why might not a state 
once reached continue indefinitely, why would not the impulse 
of self-preservation itself tend that way — why, unless aside 
from self-preservation there is an instinct in every living thing 
to be more and greater, to expand and enlarge itself, in short 
an instinct for power and domination ? 81 

Peculiarly interesting is the revision of biological notions 
that ensues. Mere self-preservation is not the life-instinct 
proper. 82 The will of living creatures is a special case of will 
to power. It is a will, however, not only to dominate (this all 

"Ibid., §636. 
78 Ibid., § 564. 
"Beyond Good and Evil, § 36; cf. Will to Power, §§ 490, 554, 658. 

80 Will to Power, §§ 631, 338, 617. 

81 Ibid., § 688. 

82 Beyond Good and Evil, § 13; Will to Power, §§650-1. 



198 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

power strives for) , but to dominate by incorporating, by making 
the foreign substance of power an integral, though subordinate, 
part of itself. 83 This is manifest in hunger and the overt acts 
of seizure — the living thing perhaps takes more than it can 
actually appropriate. 84 Exploiting, stealing belongs thus to its 
nature. Accordingly life is radically misconceived when it is 
taken as mere adaptation to environment; "adaptation" is 
something secondary — is reaction, while life is action, activity 
itself (self -activity, one might say, though Nietzsche does not 
use the phrase — he does say "spontaneous" activity) — activity 
positive, aggressing, an "attacking, encroaching, freshly-inter- 
preting, freshly-directing and shaping" force. 85 To be con- 
trolled by outer conditions, or mere accommodation to them, 
is, for Nietzsche, a sign of decadence — he thinks that Darwin 
and Spencer both overvalue outer conditions in their view of 
life. 86 aa Indeed, as he conceives the matter, life wants opposing 
outside forces — wants them to feel its power over them. In 
this way he interprets the pseudopodia of lower forms of life: 
the living substance is reaching out after something on which 
to expend its power, and appropriation is merely the conse- 
quence. 87 And when it appropriates more than it can really 
control, it proceeds to divide itself — as two, it can still control. 
There is, however, no "altruism" in the process. As "nourish- 
ment" is something secondary, the original impulse being simply 
the will to close in on whatever is at hand, so self -division or 
propagation is equally derived — where one will does not suffice 
to organize what has been appropriated, another arises. 88 ^ 
Structure, organization, is another result: it is necessary to the 
end of disposing of what has been appropriated — its meaning 
is arranging, ordering, putting in place to the end of 
dominance and use. 89 Incident to all life is power that com- 
mands and power that obeys — whatever does not command must 

88 Will to Power, § 681. 

8 * Hunger to merely replace what has been lost Nietzsche puts in a 
secondary place (ibid., §§651-2, 656). 

86 Genecblooii etc. II § 12 

88 Cf. Will to Power, §§44, 49, 70, 71, 647, 681; WerJce, XIV, 215, 
§§ 432-3. 

8T Will to Power, §§ 656, 702, 694. 

88 Will to Power, §§ 653-7. Cf. the comments on Guyau, Werke, XIII, 
113. 

"Ibid., §642. 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 199 

obey, i.e., be used, become subservient. 90 Here is the founda- 
tion for the distinction between means and end in an organism. 
The superior power overcomes the lesser, incorporates it, gives 
it its place, making it a means to its own end. 91 Hence the 
definition of an organ — something that would otherwise be inde- 
pendent is turned into a means, an instrumentality. For exam- 
ple, something that happens to be more or less suitable becomes 
an eye for the organism, something else a foot or hand, some- 
thing else still apparatus for digestion, and so on ; w they may 
not have been formed for these purposes, but the superior 
power turns them to account in these ways, ce just as one man 
may make others his slaves or as the state may convert this 
or that individual into its tool or agent. dd Wherever we find a 
thing that serves a purpose and is useful, "a will to power 
has made itself master of something less powerful, and of its 
own motion has stamped the meaning of a function upon 
it." 93 

If we do not read the organic world in terms of power, 
i.e., of controller and controlled, of master and servant, there 
is little sense in speaking of organs, functions. The very 
''meaning" of a thing implies that a superior power has got 
control of it and given it a place in relation to its own ends. 
The meaning may have nothing to do with its origin or essence 
— a thing may in the course of time have various meanings, 
depending on the nature of the power that gets control of it. 
Accordingly, the "evolution" of a thing (whether an organ 
of a body or a custom of society) is by no means necessarily 
progress toward a goal prefigured in its nature, still less a 
logical movement along the shortest lines and accomplished 
with the least expenditure of force, but rather a succession 
of processes of subjugation which it undergoes, the changes 
going more or less deep and having no necessary connection 
with one another — to which may be added its own resistances, 
attempts at change of form in self-defense, and any successes 

90 Ibid., §492; cf. Zarathustra, II, xii. 

91 Will to Power, §552. 

92 1 need not say that a view like this does not exclude more or less 
development and reshaping in detail. 

98 Genealogy etc., II, § 12 (Nietzsche explains that this holds good 
of a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, a religious 
form, or an eye or a hand). 



200 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

it may win. The form changes, flows, and the ''meaning," 
purpose, still more so. Even in an individual organism it is 
not otherwise: with every essential growth of the whole, the 
''meaning" of single parts shifts also — under given conditions, 
a partial perishing of some parts, a reduction in the number of 
others (for example, an elimination of intermediate organs) 
may be proof of the growing power and perfection of the whole. 
In other words, degeneration, losing of meaning and purpose, 
or death, may belong to the conditions of actual progress — 
something that ever appears in the form of a will and way to 
greater power and is accomplished at the expense of numberless 
lesser powers. The greatness of an advance may, indeed, be 
measured by the amount of what is sacrificed to it. For ex- 
ample, the mass of mankind sacrificed to the growth of a single, 
higher, stronger species of man — that would be an advance. 94 

This relation of controller and controlled (in whatever 
form of organic life) involves what Nietzsche calls an order of 
rank (Rangordnung) . It is a conception that plays a great 
part in his social speculations; but it originates in the general 
biological field. 95 The human body itself involves an order of 
rank; there are higher and lower in it, ends and means — it is 
teleologically constituted, though the teleology comes not from 
God or from a vague thing called Nature, but is established by 
the supreme controlling force in the body itself. Nietzsche 
speaks of the "lower world" in the body and of "the higher 
functions and functionaries for ruling, anticipating, predeter- 
mining," — for "our organism is oligarchically arranged." 96 
The mind is a part of the ruling, determining forces, and an 
instrument for accomplishing that on which they are bent. 
Every center of power in a sense measures and estimates other 
power outside it, but when this is done in clear consciousness, 
the measuring may be surer and more effective. 97 In the de- 
velopment of mind and consciousness, the need of communica- 
tion between those with common interests plays an important 
part. Mind grows in intercourse and with reference to the 
needs of intercourse — hence also the limitations of conscious- 

94 Genealogy etc., II, § 12. 
96 Will to Power, § 552. 

96 Genealogy etc., II, § 1. 

97 On consciousness as a tool, cf. Will to Power, §§ G43-4, 646. 



ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER 201 

ness: we see the general, the communicable with greater dis- 
tinctness than the altogether individual and specific (e.g., our 
individual acts and experiences, which may be incommunica- 
ble). 98 But consciousness is not an end in itself, but a means 
to the heightening of power." ee Nietzsche even suggests that 
there may be an oligarchy in the mind itself, there being not 
necessarily one subject there, as we commonly think, but several, 
the play and struggle between them making the hidden basis 
of our thinking and consciousness — or, to use the physical 
terms, there may be an aristocracy of cells, with vassals more 
or less obedient. 100 

Nietzsche has interesting reflections on will to power as in- 
volving pleasure and pain — pleasure resting on the increase of 
power, pain consisting in the feeling of weakness 101 — but I must 
merely refer to them. ff 

Will to power also lies behind thought or philosophy, as 
already explained. It too is a kind of appropriation, mastery. 
Thinking is only a sublimated action of the same forces mani- 
fested in the amoeba. Man seeks to turn all that is into some- 
thing like himself, to make it thinkable, visible, feelable — he 
subjects it to categories and turns it into his own substance, as 
the amoeba does foreign material into its own body. 102gg 

There is only one higher expression of the will to power and 
that is in the saint (in the nobler meaning of the term), the 
hero-saint, who does not turn his back on the world, but im- 
presses the image of his highest thought upon it and transforms 
it — who knows, thinks, only to love and in love to act, to 
create. hh 

So does Nietzsche interpret the whole gamut of things in 
terms of power and will to it." 

"Joyful Science, §354; cf. Will to Power, §§569, 524. 
60 Will to Power, § 711. 

100 Ibid., §§490, 492. 

101 Ibid., §693; cf. §§428, 657, 670. 

102 Zarathustra, II, ii; cf. xii; Will to Power, §§501, 510-1. 



CHAPTER XVI 
CRITICISM OF MORALITY. INTRODUCTORY 



It was a saying of Goethe that a bold and free work of art 
should be contemplated in the spirit in which it was orig- 
inally conceived. This is something to have in mind as we turn 
to Nietzsche's final ethical and social views — perhaps the most 
characteristic product of his genius. He is daring, loves strong 
and telling expressions, easily exaggerates or seems to — and if 
we do not make allowances, we may often be offended and think 
it hardly worth while to give him the attentive study he re- 
quires. We need for the moment to be touched with a little 
of his own geniality, and to exercise toward him something of 
the persistent "good will" which Emerson says gives " insight." 
He speaks as freely about himself as about other subjects. Once 
after noting that every society has a tendency to caricature its 
opponents, as we do today the "criminal," as Roman aristo- 
cratic society did the Jew, as artists do the bourgeois type, as 
pious people do the man who is godless, and aristocrats the man 
of the people, he says that immoralists — his class — incline to 
caricature the moralist and gives as an instance his own refer- 
ences to Plato. 1 Plainly we must read between the lines and 
not press every word in dealing with such a man. 

I begin with the ethical views. The material to be consid- 
ered falls naturally under two heads: criticism and construc- 
tion. Constructive effort is much more pronounced in this 
period than in the preceding, and yet criticism continues — 
indeed, it is more keen and mordant than ever. The two 
things really go hand in hand, and even his construction is not 
as complete — or even as unmistakable in meaning — as we could 
wish; his end came too early to allow him to leave more than 
torsos in any department of thought. The consideration of 

1 Will to Power, § 374. 
202 



CRITICISM OF MORALITY. INTRODUCTORY 203 

the criticism will require several chapters, the present one being 
a kind of introduction to the general subject. 

ii 

Nietzsche notes that modern Europe (really the Western 
world in general) is in a kind of chaos as to moral conceptions. 
The old morality was built on the God-idea, and this is passing 
away — indeed is already dead, 2 i.e., for the intellectual circles 
of which he takes account. It is naive to think that the morality 
can long remain when the sanctioning God is lacking — the 
"beyond" being necessary, if belief in it is to be unimpaired. 3 
We are in a "moral interregum ' ' 4 — Nietzsche might have as- 
sented to Matthew Arnold's language, describing us as wan- 
derers between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be 
born. The dissolving of the old morality is leading to the 
atomistic individual as a practical consequence, and even fur- 
ther — to the breaking up of the individual himself, so that he 
becomes several things rather than one; a state of absolute 
flux. 5 Superficial critics think that this is a result in which 
Nietzsche found satisfaction, being opposed to "all ideals and 
all faith"; 6 but he calls it "something fearful." The passage 
in which he says this is worth quoting : "I see something fearful 
ahead — chaos in the first instance, everything fluid. Nothing 
that has value in itself, nothing that commands "Thou 
oughtst." It is a condition of things not to be borne; to the 
spectacle of this destruction we must oppose creation; to these 
wandering aims we must oppose one aim — create it." 7 The 
passage paraphrased immediately before ends, "On this ac- 
count an aim is now more needed than ever and love, a new 
love." 

Nietzsche gives several illustrations of the existing chaos. 
Here is one man for whom a morality is proved by its utility, 

2 Joyful Science, § 343. 
» Will to Power, § 253. 
* Dawn of Day, § 452. 

6 Werke, XII, 358, § 674. 

8 For example, Paul Elmer More, op. cit., p. 66. Cf. Nietzsche's 
language with regard to eternal recurrence, " I teach you redemption 
from the eternal flux " ( Werke, XII, 369, § 723 ) . 

7 Werke, XII, 358-9, § 675. Nietzsche had noted the mere fact of 
varying standards earlier (without urging a corrective as now), see 
e.g., ibid., XI, 193-8. 



204 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

and there one for whom a morality is refuted, if its origin in 
utility is shown. 8 Now an action is held in esteem because it 
comes hard to the doer, and now one because it is done easily ; 
one action is valued because it is unusual, another because it is 
customary; one, because a man thereby shows his regard for 
his best good, another because he does not think of himself af 
all; one because it is duty, another because it is inclination; one 
because it is instinct, another because it is clearest reason. 9 
There is another list of contrarieties, covering somewhat the 
same ground, but adding the following particulars: we call a 
mild conciliatory person good, but also one who is brave, un- 
bending, and strict; we call the unconditional friend of truth 
good, but also the man of piety who transfigures things; we 
call one who obeys himself good, but also one who is devout; 
we call the superior, the noble man good, but also one who 
does not despise or look down; we call a good-natured man, 
one who avoids strife good, but also one who is eager for 
strife and victory; we call one who will ever be first good, 
but also one who wishes no precedence over others. 10 In 
other words, there are different moralities in us today, 
different standards and ideas of good. 11 And not only do men 
disagree with one another, but individuals disagree with them- 
selves, now judging from one standard of valuation and 
now from another. 12 We are really a kind of mishmash (this 
is to Nietzsche one of the characteristic marks of modernity) — 
we are so intellectually and we are perhaps so physically, dif- 
fering races and old-time social castes being mingled in us. We 
are not without moral feeling, we have an immense fund of it, 
immense force, but no common aim in the pursuit of which this 
may be turned to account. 13 * How to transcend the present 
moral anarchy becomes a driving motive with Nietzsche, par- 
ticularly in this last period of his life. 

8 Dawn of Day, § 230. 

9 Werke, XI, 195, § 100. 

10 Ibid., XII, 81, § 157. 

11 Beyond Good and Evil, § 215. 

12 Will to Power, § 259. 

"Werke, XIII, 358, §673; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 20C. 



' CRITICISM OF MORALITY. INTRODUCTORY 205 

in 

First, however, and all the more because of this ultimate 
aim, he feels the need of moral criticism — a path on which, as 
we have seen, he started in his previous period. He turns 
morality, the whole circle of conceptions involved, into a 
problem. In taking this attitude he is unusual, if not unique. 15 
The common view is that morality is something given, self- 
evident, at least easily made so, that the real difficulties are 
with practice; or that, if there are theoretic difficulties, these 
are simply in finding an adequate formula or adequate "basis" 
for something, the obligation of which is unquestionable. Kant 
and Schopenhauer take this view — Professor Simmel particu- 
larly notes Nietzsche's difference from them in that he does not 
limit himself to the task of codifying moral demands com- 
monly recognized. 14 Dr. Dolson also comments on the striking 
difference between Nietzsche and most ethical writers in this 
respect. 15 Schopenhauer had cited neminem laede, immo omnes, 
quantum potes, juva as if it were a rule which nobody ques- 
tioned and about which all moral philosophers are agreed; 
Nietzsche regards him as naive. 16 He regards Kant and Hegel 
also as uncritical. Kant wrote, indeed, the "Critique of Prac- 
tical Reason;'' but it is not criticism in the sense in which 
Nietzsche feels that there is need of it — Kant took our ordinary 
morality, even Rousseau's extreme democratic formulation of 
it, for granted, he did not skeptically inquire into it. Hegel's 
criticism did not touch the moral ideal itself, but only asked 
whence comes the opposition to it, why it has not been attained 
or is not demonstrable in small and great. 17 Spinoza did ques- 
tion the finality of the moral valuations, but it was indirectly 
only and as a consequence of his theodicy. 18 English Utilitarian- 
ism looked critically into the origin of the moral valuations, 
but it none the less believed in them as implicitly as the Chris- 
tian does. 19 Our latest moral investigators, says Nietzsche, are 

1 * Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, pp. 230-1. 
16 Op. cit., p. 97. 

16 Beyond Good and Evil, § 186; cf. Werke, XIII, 106. 

17 Will to Power, § 253. 

18 Ibid., § 410. 

19 Ibid., §253. 



206 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

thoroughly convinced that science has here only to explore a 
matter of fact, not to criticise. 20 c 

The vital omission of these investigators and historians of 
morality is that they do not ask what it is worth, and hence 
what binding quality it has for us today. Ethics is a question of 
norms ; it means what we should do — it cannot be reduced to a 
set of historical or psychological propositions. And where the 
vital question is envisaged, Nietzsche feels that the reasoning 
is apt to be superficial. A consensus of peoples, or at least 
of civilized peoples, as to certain points in morality is asserted, 
and hence, it is argued, it is unconditionally binding on you 
and me ; or, on the other hand, the differences in the valuations 
of different peoples are pointed out, and the conclusion is 
drawn that there is nothing obligatory about morality at all. 
Both proceedings are childishness. The worth of a prescrip- 
tion "thou oughtst" is independent of opinion about it, as 
truly as the worth of a medicament is independent of whether 
one thinks scientifically or like an old woman about medicine. 
A morality could grow out of an error, and with such an 
insight the problem of its value would not even be touched. 21 
Even the general principle "we must act and hence must have 
a rule of action,' ' cannot be taken for granted; the Buddhists 
said, "we must not act," and thought out a way of deliverance 
from action [a way to nirvana].* 2 For Nietzsche morality is 
thus problem from top to bottom. The idea that it constitutes 
a realm where doubt is impossible, one indeed in which we may 
take! refuge when doubt is assailing us in all other spheres — 
this idea that has played no small part in the spiritual experi- 
ence of earnest men in recent times — is to his mind without 
warrant. There is no helping it — we must extend skeptical 
inquiry and critical reflection to morality itself. d 

What particularly presses in this direction is the fact of 
varying types of morality in the world [not "types of ethical 
theory" merely, or principally] between which we must choose. 
Previous ethical writers, including the historians of morality, 
ordinarily stand quite unsuspectingly under the commando of 

20 Werke, XIII, 117. 

21 See Genealogy etc., preface, §5; Werke, XIV, 401-2, §278; Joyful 
Science, § 345. 

82 Will to Power, § 458. 



CRITICISM OF MORALITY. INTRODUCTORY 207 

a special morality and have no idea how limited their vision 
is. Their good and bad they regard as good and bad itself. 
Socrates indeed was skeptical and modest, but his disciples did 
not imitate him. 23 And this morality, which is so commonly 
accepted, is simply the morality of the common man, the social- 
creature man, who lives in and with and for his herd or com- 
munity as the animal does in, with, and for its. Morality, the 
prevailing morality, is Eeerdenthier morality; and it thinks 
that it is morality itself, and that there is no other! But his- 
tory shows that there are other types of morality, and the 
genuine thinker has to ask, Why this and not that ? 24 

It is only putting this into other language to say that 
philosophical reflection has been at its poorest in dealing with 
good and evil. Predominant social forces have always been 
against thoroughgoing criticism here. Morality has been in- 
vested with authority, even visible authority — and authorities 
are not to be questioned, but obeyed! Indeed to question 
morality — was it not immoral? Yes, Nietzsche asks, is it not 
immoral? — does not a similar feeling exist today? There is 
also something seductive about morality; it throws a kind of 
spell over us — in face of it the critical will is lamed; he calls 
it the " Circe of philosophers, ' ' citing as instances Kant, with 
his desire above everything else to clear the way for "majestic 
moral structures," and Schopenhauer, who was seduced so far 
that in the name of morality he was ready to turn against life 
itself. 25 A result of the unquestioning attitude to morality is 
to make discourse about it trite — it becomes a twice-told tale. 
Talking about it, Nietzsche somewhat mockingly remarks, is a 
good preparation for sleep. 26 This may be part reason, I may 
add on my own account, why keen thinkers, who wish to ac- 
complish something with their thinking, sometimes feel no par- 
ticular attraction to ethics — they want to face problems, and 
ethics hardly seems to offer any. e As I understand Nietzsche, 
he by no means questions the utility of this matter-of-course 

28 Joyful Science, §345; Werke, XIII, 96. 

24 Cf. Werke, XIV, 67-8, §134; Will to Power, §458. 

25 Dawn of Day, preface, §3; Werke, XIII, 117; Genealogy etc., 
preface, §§5, 6; Will to Poicer, §§461, 401. Cf., on Christian morality 
and its seductive influence on thinkers, Ecce Homo, IV. § 6. 

28 Zarathustra, III, xii, §2; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §228. 



208 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

morality — it functions most usefully in average society; he 
simply finds it intellectually uninteresting, or rather first inter- 
esting when a sense of the problematical in it is aroused. Then 
indeed it may become dangerously interesting, so much so that 
it is perhaps just as well that few regard it in this light. 27 But 
however this may be, morality does become a problem to him — 
I might say, his great and specific problem. ''To see and indi- 
cate the problem of morality — that seems to me the new task 
and principal thing. I deny that it has been done in previous 
moral philosophy." 28 The most settled and commonplace fea- 
tures of the subject excite his skeptical wonderment. "I 
wonder at the most recognized things in morality, — and other 
philosophers, like Schopenhauer, have only been struck by the 
'wonders' in morality." 29 He calls his an "attempt to 
think about morality, without standing under its spell." 30 

IV 

As just stated, he does not recommend his attitude to all. 
The question as to the origin and root meaning of good and 
evil he speaks of as a "stilles Problem" which "addresses 
itself selectively to only a few ears." 31 "We are the exception 
and the danger" and "forever need justification," he admits, 
adding that something may be said in favor of the exception, 
provided that it does not seek to become the rule. 32 There is 
perhaps also a suggestion of the dangerousness of his under- 
taking in an aphorism labeled "Casuistic": "There is a bitter 
(bitterbose) alternative to which every man's courage and char- 
acter are not equal: as passengers on a ship to discover that 
captain and pilot are making dangerous errors, and that in 
nautical knowledge we are superior to them — and now to ask our- 
selves : How is it, should you not incite a mutiny against them 
and have them both imprisoned? Does not your superiority 
obligate you to do this? And on the other hand, are they not 
in the right in locking you up, since you undermine authority ? 

2T So in effect Beyond Good and Evil, § 228. 
88 Will to Poiver, § 263. 

29 Werke, XIII, 16, § 33. 

30 Will to Power, §253; cf. Joyful Science, §§359, 375; Beyond Good 
and Evil, § 33. 

11 Genealogy etc., I, § 5. 
82 Joyful Science, § 76. 



CRITICISM OF MORALITY. INTRODUCTORY 209 

This is a parable for higher and worse situations; whereby the 
question still remains what guarantees to us our superiority, 
our faith in ourselves in such cases. The result? But for this 
we must do the thing that carries all the dangers with it — 
and not only dangers for us, but for the ship. ' ' M Hence 
Nietzsche takes responsibility solely — or if he wishes com- 
panions, it is only men of like temper and mind with himself; 
his writings are chiefly to find out persons of this type — not 
to persuade others. He is a law for his own, not for all. 3 * His 
ground is 

" Glattes Eis, 
Ein Paradeis 
Fur den, der gut zu tanzen weiss." 80 

And the positions he finally reaches are often themselves 
frankly tentative, experimental/ 

In this ethical field as elsewhere Nietzsche gives us little 
in order. There is a somewhat connected treatment of certain 
themes in Genealogy of Morals; but aside from this we have 
only a mass of aphorisms and notes, written at different times, 
in different moods, and from different angles of vision. At 
times I have been almost in despair over the multifariousness 
of my subject-matter, and I can only offer as orderly and con- 
sistent a statement as the refractory character of it will allow. 
It is like trying to make a cosmos out of the chaos of the world 
itself; perhaps the world is chaos rather than cosmos; and yet, 
on the other hand, it may be that the trouble is with us and 
that finer perception and a larger outlook would discover unities 
in difference that now escape us. 

83 Daivn of Day, § 436. 
•* Zarathustra, IV, xii. 
85 " Scherz, List, und Rache," § 13, prefixed to Joyful Science. 



CHAPTER XVII 

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 
AND MEANING OF MORALITY 



Criticism has for its presupposition a certain detachment from 
the object criticised ; it is a curious look at it from the outside, 
unbiased by personal feeling — at least it is in this sense that 
Nietzsche criticises morality. "In order for once to get a view 
of our European morality from a distance, to measure it by 
other moralities, past or to come, we must do as a traveler does 
who wishes to know how high the towers of a city are : to that 
end he leaves the city. 'Thoughts about moral prejudices,' 
if they are not to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose 
a position outside morality, some kind of a beyond good and 
evil, to which we must climb, clamber, or take a flight — and, at 
all events in the instance supposed a beyond our good and evil, 
a liberation from all 'Europe/ this being understood as a 
sum of valuations of mandatory character, which have passed 
over into our flesh and blood. " Nietzsche is aware that there 
may be a little madness in proposing to do this, and that the 
question is whether we really can* He answers half-playfully 
that it is in the main a question of how light or how heavy we 
are, the problem of our "specific gravity"; we must be very 
light to rise to a height from which we can survey millenniums 
and besides have pure heaven in our eyes, must have freed 
ourselves from much that weighs just us Europeans" down, must 
first of all have overcome our own time — yes, and our hostility 
to the time, our disharmony with it, our romanticism. 1 

In describing the critical attitude Nietzsche uses the term 
"immoralist." The word does not occur, so far as I know, in 
the dictionaries (e.g., in Muret-Sanders' Worterbuch or the Cen- 
tury Dictionary), and by Nietzsche it is first used in The Wan- 
derer and his Shadow (1879). He there says, "Moralists must 

1 Joyful Science, § 380. 
210 



SOCIAL MEANING OF MORALITY 211 

now allow themselves to be reproachfully called immoralists, 
because they dissect morality. Whosoever wishes to dissect 
must kill; however, only in order that better knowledge, better 
judgment, better life may arise, not that all the world is to dis- 
sect/ ' Dissection, he explains in the succeeding aphorism, does 
not mean denial or depreciation, and he distinguishes the great 
moralists from the smaller sort by this token. The great ones, 
when they analyze the grand manner of thought, say of a hero 
of Plutarch's, or the illumined state of really good men and 
women, and find complications of motive in what is apparently 
simple, delicate illusions playing a part, have simply the sense 
of a difficult problem of knowledge before them; but the small 
moralists say, ''here are deceivers and deceptions" — that is, 
they deny the existence of just what the others are seeking to 
explain. 2 It is the intellectual motive that makes the moralist, 
and in another place he compares the lesser sort, who are 
without the love of knowledge and know only the pleasure of 
hurting, to small boys who are not happy save as they are 
pursuing and mistreating the living and the dead. 3 At the same 
time the genuine moralist is too preoccupied with his special 
work to be a preacher of morality. The older moralists, he says, 
dissected insufficiently and preached all too often; and it is 
apparently to mark off the new kind, who merely dissect and 
hence incur the suspicion of being anti-moral, that he consents 
to the application of the label "immoralists" to them. 4 He 
speaks of it as an " unpleasant result, ' ' and takes up the phrase 
and applies it to himself somewhat as one would pick up a 
gauntlet. One may, or even must, question the wisdom of his 
doing this, since the ordinary person, unaware of nice distinc- 
tions and thinking that "immoralist" must imply some sort of 
advocacy of immorality, as "moralist" does of morality, infers 
that Nietzsche was on the side of license and vice. b I need not 
say after the foregoing that this is a mistaken view. Neither 

3 The Wanderer etc., §§ 19, 20. 
8 Dawn of Day, § 357. 

4 The Wanderer etc., § 20. Also in Beyond Good and Evil, § 228 (cf. 
Werke, XIII, 114, § 255) he contrasts the moral preacher or Puritan with 
the moralist. There is the same intellectualist meaning in the reference 
to the " old varied moralistic culture " of the French, — a respect in 
which they far surpassed, he thinks, the Germans {Beyond Good and 
Evil, § 254 ) . 



212 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

moralists nor immoralists are advocates, as he uses the terms,, 
but critics, analysts. The scientific motive characterizes both 
alike, and apparently, as just stated, it was to emphasize this, 
fact that he took up with the more unusual term. That he does 
not become, any more than he had been, an advocate of license 
and vice, will probably be sufficiently clear in future pages. 
Indeed, we shall find him saying strongly, "we immoralists" 
are "men of duty," "also to us speaks a 'thou oughtst,' " "we 
also obey a strict law above us. " 5 All the same it must be 
frankly admitted that at times Nietzsche veers from this purely 
critical conception of the immoralist and uses the term in a 
more or less doctrinal, partisan sense. 6 He confuses, one might 
say, an attitude, a method with a result — at least with what 
was the result in his own case. From being "outside" Euro- 
pean morality, a simple observer and critic of it, he came to 
be against it — and perhaps the truth is that he was against it 
from the start, however unclearly or undecidedly. Even so, 
he was not against morality, but against a certain type of 
morality — and within limits he recognized the usefulness and 
validity of this type, as we shall later see. 

Undoubtedly Nietzsche has injured himself in the eyes of 
the general public by using the obnoxious term, and yet it is 
probable that he would have excited prejudice anyway by the 
detached critical attitude toward morality which he assumed. 
Society can hardly look on with indifference when any of its 
number stand outside the common agreements and look ques- 
tioningly at them, least of all at an agreement so central and 
deep as morality. A morality is not unlike a God who wishes no 
other Gods beside him: it resents, Nietzsche says, the idea of 
many moralities, wants no comparison, no criticism, but uncon- 
ditional faith in itself. It is hence in its nature anti-scientific, 
and the perfect moralist must be outside it (unmoralisch) , 
beyond its good and evil. 7 "Plato has splendidly described 
how the philosophical thinker in the midst of every de facta 
society has to pass as the quintessence of all that is impious; 
for as critic of all mores he is the antithesis of the moral man, 

5 Beyond Good and Evil, § 226 ; Dawn of Day, preface, § 4. 
6 Cf., for example, Will to Power, §§ 116, 132, 211, 235, 374. 
'Werkc, XIII. 114-5, §256. 



SOCIAL MEANING OF MORALITY 213 

and if he does not carry things so far as to become a legislator 
of new mores, he remains in the recollection of men as an 
instance of 'the evil principle.' " 8 That is, it irritates men to 
have one question what all believe, and if he is a good man, 
they do not see why he should. But whether Nietzsche made 
matters worse for himself by using the term ' ' immoralist " or 
not, his meaning (at least his initial and fundamental mean- 
ing) in using it is clear — and we may now pass on to a detailed 
consideration of the dissection or critical analysis he gives. The 
analysis, it must be confessed, is rarely pure — exhibitions of 
personal feeling, anticipations of his own positive views are 
frequent; really the distinction between his criticism and his 
construction in this realm is a more or less arbitrary one — and 
yet it is convenient and is suggested by himself, and I shall 
regard it as far as the material to be dealt with will allow. 

ii 

Taking then our stand with Nietzsche outside morality for the 
time, looking at it with as much of the purely scientific spirit as 
we can command, what do we find — that is, what does he find ? 

First, in continuation of the view we have already come 
upon in considering the second period, 9 morality reveals itself 
as a phenomenon of society, something strictly social in nature. 
The classical passage in this connection is Dawn of Day, § 9, 
which bears the title, "Begriff der Sittlichkeit der Sitte." 
Every student of Nietzsche should read it carefully, if only to 
see how much of scientific analysis he can compress on occasion 
into three or four pages. The ground marks of morality here 
appear, as not individual utility, but authority on the one hand 
and obedience on the other. The authority, however, is general 
or social; and the obedience, like the fear or reverence deepen- 
ing to superstition from which it springs, is not to any person. 
The central thing is the Sitten (mores) 10 of the social group, 

8 Dawn of Day, § 496. 

9 See ante, pp. 120-3. 

10 It will be simpler hereafter to use the Latin mores as an equivalent 
for Sitten — our English word " customs " failing, without some qualifying 
adjective, to indicate the weight and authority which attach to them. 
W. G. Sumner was perhaps the first to make extended use of the term 
in. scientific discussion of the subject — see his Folkways, particularly pp. 
36-7; cf. also ch. iv of Dewey and Tufts' Ethics. 



214 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

morality, in the subjective sense, being definable as action ac- 
cording to them. A Sitte or mos is a long-established social 
habit or rule — one that may be followed or not, d and that has 
gravity because it is believed to be vitally related to the wel- 
fare of the group. Individuals may impose commands, but 
only societies can have mores; and because no one knows just 
whence they come, superstition has free range in accounting 
for them. 6 The mores were of a wide range in early communi- 
ties; they covered health, marriage, medicine, war, agriculture, 
religion — so that morality was almost co-extensive with the 
whole of life. 11 On the other hand, in things where no tradi- 
tion commanded, there was no morality; and the less life was 
determined by tradition the smaller the circle of morality be- 
came — so that with this in mind Nietzsche can say that we now 
live in a relatively unmoral time, so many things being left 
to individual judgment or inclination. The opposite of the 
moral man was one who acted (or was disposed to) according 
to his own ideas — almost inevitably he seemed evil to the rest 
of the community; indeed in all primitive conditions of man- 
kind "evil" was practically equivalent to " individual, ' ' 
"free," "arbitrary," "unusual," "unforeseen," "unreckon- 
able." 12 Even if the individual did what was moral, yet not 
because tradition commanded it, but for other reasons, say for 
personal advantage, or if in varying from tradition he acted 
from the very motives of the general advantage which estab- 
lished the tradition in the first place, but of his own motion 
purely, he was liable to be esteemed unmoral and might view 
himself in this light — morality being a matter of conformity 
and obedience altogether. The only way in which one could 
rise to independence of the mores was to become a law- 
giver oneself, a medicine-man or half-God — that is, to make 
mores, a fearful enterprise in which one risked one's own 
life. 

In this circle of conceptions who was the most moral? It 
was either he who fulfilled the law most often, and so, like the 



"On the range of the mores, cf. Wundt, Ethics (Eng. tr.), I, 265-6; 
Lazarus, Zeitschrift filr Volkerpsychologie, I, 452. 

12 The word here is hose — see the full explanation in the following 
chapter. 



SOCIAL MEANING OF MORALITY 215 

Brahman, took the consciousness of it everywhere and into each 
smallest fraction of time, so that he even invented occasions 
for fulfilling it ; or else he who fulfilled it in the most difiicult 
cases, who sacrificed most of it — at least these were the principal 
measurements. And where sacrifice was the thing exalted, the 
motive for it should not be mistaken. The mastery of self im- 
plied was not for the individual's benefit, but that the law 
might stand out sovereign, even against the individual's interest 
and desire. It is true that in the course of time, some, following 
in the footsteps of Socrates, took self-mastery and self-denial 
as the individual's most real advantage and key to happiness, 
but they were the exception — something we only fail to realize 
today because we have been educated under their influence; 
they all went on a new way and encountered the highest dis- 
approval of representatives of the old morality — they were 
really separatists, and so far unmoral, and, in the deepest sense, 
evil (hose). To a virtuous Roman of the old stamp, the Chris- 
tian who "sought first for his own salvation" seemed evil in 
just the same way. 

Such were the original ground-lines of morality, as Nietz- 
sche conceives the matter. As to whether men always existed 
in groups, his opinion appears to vary. So far as a view anywise 
approaching consistency can be made out, it was as follows: 
There may have been a time when men (or some men) existed 
independently and had to be brought forcibly under social 
restraint and rule ; f but practically it is a negligible time, 
groups, flocks, or herds of some kind having existed as far back 
in history as we can go, so that properly we can only speak of 
higher and stronger forms of social organization imposing them- 
selves on lower and weaker forms, with a comparatively weak 
and relatively unsocial state as a hypothetical beginning. 8 
These groups (Heerden is the term Nietzsche often uses, not 
unmindful of its association with animal phenomena, and partly 
just for this reason) 13 were veritable entities or wholes — an 
individual had a feeling for his group out of all proportion to 
that which he had for a neighbor. 14 h Strictly personal relations 

13 He uses the term sometimes, however, in the widest sense, covering 
" family-alliances, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches " {Be- 
yond Good and Evil, § 199 ) . 

"Werke, XII, 97, § 197. 



216 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

were only gradually brought under the rule of morality ; Nietz- 
sche even ventures to say that in the best Roman period a 
pitying action was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor 
unmoral, or, if praised, was valued slightly in comparison with 
an action that affected the res publica. 15 Down to the present 
day he finds morality's prescriptions vague, crude, unfine for 
personal well-being. 16 And yet there was something elevated 
in this group-morality despite or rather just because of its 
taking so little account of individuals; fashioned in this way 
the individual became a public being, or, as Nietzsche puts it, 
a collective individual. 17 So organically was he a part of the 
group, so little did he have a separate life of his own, that he 
was ready to risk his life for it on occasion. As animals, in 
whom the social impulses overrule individual ones, perform 
actions that are to their own hurt, though useful to their herd 
or flock, so is it with men. 18 

Nietzsche sometimes speaks as if the state [some kind of 
authoritative organized social existence] were prior to individ- 
uals — they arising at the end of the social process rather than 
existing at the beginning. 19 Older, he says, is the pleasure in 
the herd than the pleasure in the I; the crafty and loveless I 
that seeks its own advantage in the advantage of many is not 
the origin of the herd, but the ruin of it. 20 Society does not 
form itself out of individuals, does not arise from contracts 
between them. 21 Peoples created before individuals ; indeed the 
individual himself is the latest creation. 22 Nietzsche roundly 
asserts, as against Paul Ree, that the herd-instinct was orig- 
inally the stronger and more powerful thing, and that when 
one presumed to act separately and individually (i.e., not ac- 



15 Beyond Good and Evil, § 201. If altruistic actions in these unitary 
primitive societies had an I-feeling as a presupposition, it was a col- 
lective I, — they were quite other than our actions from pity {Werke, XIII, 
188, §417). 

18 Werke, XI, 243, § 203; Dawn of Day, § 107; Joyful Science, § 335. 

1T Werke, XII, 97, § 197; Human, etc., § 94. 

18 Werke, XIII, 187. 

10 Ibid., XII, 112; 113-4, §226. 

20 Zarathustra, I, xv. Cf. Werke, XIII, 213, §500 ("Love of the 
community is older than selfishness, in any case for a long time 
stronger " ) . 

21 Werke, XII, 111. 

22 Zarathustra, I, xv. 



SOCIAL MEANING OF MORALITY 217 

cording to the herd-law), he seemed to the rest evil. 23 On so 
deep and ancient a foundation does morality rest, in his view. 
He virtually defines moral actions as organic functions of indi- 
viduals, in which not the individual, but a higher principle is 
the aim. 24 Still more concisely, " Morality is the herd-instinct 
[ruling] in the individual. ' ' ffi * 

ni 

As to the content of morality, Nietzsche goes little beyond 
what we have already found him saying in his second period. 26 
The mores of different groups vary widely, and superficially 
nothing may seem constant in morality but its form. Yet there 
are certain mores which tend to arise everywhere. While any 
mos is better than none — a great proposition with which, Nietz- 
sche says, civilization begins 27 — some kinds of behavior are so 
necessary to social life that norms corresponding to them are 
practically universal. If men injure one another, lie to one 
another, if they do not to some extent help one another, they 
can hardly form a group at all. Animal society itself rests on 
something like love, constancy of affection, education of the 
young, labor, economy, courage, obedience on the part of the 
weaker, protecting care on the part of the stronger, sacrifice 
among all. No society can maintain itself without such quali- 
ties, and in those continuing the impulses become hereditary. 28 
Sympathy (Mitgefiihl) a factor in social formations, the readi- 
ness of men to aid one another and have understandings a 
condition of life — such is Nietzsche's point of view. 29 To how- 
ever slight an extent, rudiments of "mutual consideration, pity, 
reasonableness, mildness, reciprocity of services" make their 
appearance. 30 "Peaceable, reasonable, moderate, modest, con- 
siderate, chaste, honest, true, loyal, pitiful, dutiful, obedient, 

23 Werke, XIII, 111, §253. 

"Ibid., XIII, 173, §397; cf. XII, 109, §223. 

26 Joyful Science, § 116. 

26 See ante, pp. 120 ff. 

27 Dawn of Day, §16. Cf. a remark in another connection, "Only 
within confines established by tradition, fixed custom, circumscribed 
horizons (Beschrankung) is there comfort in the world" (Werke, XI, 
144). 

28 Werke, XIII, 187. 

29 See, for instance, incidental remarks in Werke, XIV, 323-4. 
80 Beyond Good and Evil, § 201. 



218 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

unselfish, industrious" — such is another list of the qualities and 
impulses that tend to be praised ; all not on their own account, 
but as means to the group 's ends, as necessary for its preserva- 
tion and advancement. 31 One might call them essential moral- 
ity — as distinguished from the morality that varies from one 
people to another; Nietzsche does not use the phrase, but his 
view seems to warrant it. Everywhere there is a tendency 
toward the exaltation of virtues of this description, i.e., within 
each group and as conditions of the group 's life. 

Morality thus comes to be seen in a certain perspective, and 
we understand the gravity which has always been attached to 
it. As a condition of life for the group, 32 it is supremely 
important; if it is not respected, the group structure becomes 
loose, the group itself is liable to be dissolved. From the 
latter 's most intimate instincts of self-preservation come af- 
firmation and negation, approval and disapproval, praise and 
blame accordingly. The group may of course err in making 
particular judgments — may regard things as necessary to its 
well-being which are not, may treat individuals as responsible 
when they are not, but judge as best it can it must. If it will 
live, it must value, i.e., look at things in relation to itself and 
its needs, and pronounce accordingly; it must have tables of 
good and evil, must love and hate, praise and blame, reward 
and punish. 33 The good is good for it, the evil evil for it — it is 
Indeed the first creator of good and evil, individual estimates 
coming later. 34 

At the same time good, being good for the group, is not a 
good over it. It makes categories of good and evil which bind its 
members, but in the nature of the case they do not apply 
to itself. Morality has its meaning as the conduct that serves 
it, but the group is not in the relation of service to something 
beyond itself; nor as creator of good and evil is it subject 

81 Will to Power, § 284. 

82 The expression " life-conditions," or its equivalent, appears re- 
peatedly; cf. Will to Power, §§204, 216, 256; Werke, XIII, 139, §§320-3; 
XIV, 67, §132; 338, §188. 

33 Zarathustra, I, xv; Werke, XIII, 197, § 435; Will to Power, §§ 216, 
293. 

8 4 Zarathustra, I, xv. Dewey and Tufts speak of man as "an active 
and organizing judge and creator of values" {op. cit., p. 184), but appear 
to have in mind individuals rather than groups. 



SOCIAL MEANING OF MORALITY 219 

to its own creation. The group simply does what it must do to 
live, taking itself as a fact of nature. 35 To bring it somehow 
under the moral categories, we may say it has a right to exist, 
but even this language is inexact in Nietzsche's view, for, as 
has already been hinted and we shall see more clearly later, he 
finds rights arising by contract or under a general system of 
law, and it is not in this way that social groups arise or main- 
tain themselves (save in exceptional circumstances) — they are 
spontaneous natural formations and are guided purely by in- 
stincts of self-preservation. 36 Instead of having a right to 
exist, we can only truthfully say that they will exist — this will 
being shown indeed in the imperatives they put on their mem- 
bers, the rules they require them to obey: it is their will to 
be and to rule that is the explanation of morality. 37 In other 
words, the group itself is outside morality, and the virtues 
serve an instinct which is fundamentally different in character 
from themselves. As imperative and binding as morality is 
upon individuals, as necessary to the very life of the com- 
munity as it may be, so that the latter stands or falls with it, 
it is not good on its own account or as an end in itself, but 
as means to an end beyond it — an end that can only be described 
in non-moral terms. 38 

How true the last remark is to Nietzsche's thought, though 
the language is my own, is shown in what he says of the relation 
of social groups to one another. On occasion they feel and 
act in a way which is the exact opposite of what they require 
of their members in their conduct to one another. They may 
be mutually hostile, selfish, unmerciful, full of the desire to 
dominate — and all in good conscience. 39 The members of one 
group may deceive, rob, kill those of another group without 
the slightest self-reproach. In a famous passage ("infamous," 
some would say) Nietzsche describes a highly moralized race, 
its members self-restrained in their dealings with one another 
and showing all manner of mutual considerateness, delicacy of 

85 Cf. the suggestions of Werke, XIII, 214, § 500. 

86 Will to Power, § 728. 

87 This will not merely to be, but to rule is asserted in Will to Power, 
§275; Werke, XIII, 197, §435; XIV, 90-1, §184. 

88 Will to Power, § 284. 
39 Ibid., §284. 



220 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

feeling, loyalty, and friendship, falling on a stranger race, mur- 
dering, burning, ravishing, torturing, and with no graver feel- 
ings than those of students on a lark. 40 Even today the groups 
we call nations or states have a double stardard: they forbid 
violence within and allow or even command it on occasion 
without — the very acts which are offenses, crimes in the one 
case, meeting with general approval or applause in the other. 
Inconsistent, we may say — but really so only to a confused 
perception. Moral conduct (in the historic sense of "moral") 
is the conduct becoming to members of a social whole and in 
furtherance of the ends of the social whole — but it is no wider 
than the social whole, and where there is no social whole, it 
has in the nature of the case no application. If some of us 
today condemn certain acts of nations or states as immoral, 
we do so in the name of a sentiment or idea to which no reality 
as yet corresponds; we imply a society, a social whole, which 
has no existence, but which, if it existed, would of necessity 
put this brand on the acts in question. It is surely inept to 
speak of the society of the human race at present; it is even 
inept to speak of Europe as a society — it is a collection of 
independent societies, of separate sovereign wholes. 41 j The only 
way in which separate wholes can be properly amenable to 
morality is to cease to he separate wholes, to merge themselves 
in one another or in some greater unity — then the law by which 
the larger whole lives becomes the law for each individual one. 
Independent societies already do this to a limited extent, namely 
so far as they make contracts or treaties with one another or 
liave common understandings: to this extent they part with 
their individual sovereignty and become subject to moral rule. 
A society that breaks a treaty, that violates a common under- 
standing, commits ipso facto an immoral act. But societies 
which have no treaties or understandings — independent, sov- 
ereign social groups — are in the nature of the case non-moral 
beings. 42 

Yes, individuals themselves, so far as they are agents of 
the group, acquire a more or less non-moral character. An 

40 Genealogy etc., I, §11. 

41 This was written before the present war. 

42 The statements here are my own — but I think I follow the logic 
of Nietzsche's thought. 



SOCIAL MEANING OF MORALITY 221 

official of the state is without feeling of guilt when he hangs 
a man (kills), or puts him in prison (enslaves), or takes his 
money in taxation (robs), or as a policeman or detective de- 
ceives and traps him (lies), 43 — though all these things done on 
his own account would be immoral. The fact that he acts for 
the group, in the interest of the group, takes away shame. 
There is a double standard, but no contradiction; as a group- 
organ, he shares the innocence of the group. It is so with the 
soldier, so with the head of the state — they cannot be judged 
as is the private citizen. Nietzsche remarks that the antag- 
onism of duties, comes to a head in the shepherd of the 
flock — he must be both friendly, peaceable, protecting, i.e., 
to those within its circle, and hostile, warlike, merciless, i.e., to 
those without. 44 In this connection I may mention his interest- 
ing suggestion (in keeping with his general view of the priority 
of social to individual life), that some of the feelings which we 
commonly call individual or even egoistic are not really so, but 
are social and have been socially trained. For instance, one 
hates more, more violently, more innocently as a patriot than 
as an individual; one sacrifices more quickly for one's family 
or for a church or a party than for oneself; the strongest 
feeling which many have is honor, and honor is a social standard, 
meaning at bottom what is honored. 45 So-called egoistic im- 
pulses are often really impulses to social formations. Here is 
a person who is covetous and heaps up property (the impulse 
of the family) ; here is another who has markedly the sex- 
impulse (something which serves the race), and still another 
who is vain (emphasizes the community by estimating himself 
according to its measurements). We speak of the egoism of 
the conqueror, the statesman, and so on — they do think only of 
themselves, but of "themselves" so far as the ego is developed 
by an impulse which at the same time builds or fashions a 
group (cf. the egoism of mothers, of teachers). 46 It may be 
that the individual, apart from some kind of group-function 
and training, is a very limited quantity. 

And now I come to a kind of paradox in Nietzsche's 
analysis. Societies, as we have seen, set up, whether con- 

48 Werke, XIII, 195-6; cf. XII, 115. 40 Werke, XII, 116, §229. 
44 Will to Power, § 284. "Ibid., XII, 117, § 230. 



222 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

sciously or unconsciously, moral codes which correspond to the 
conditions of their existence and power; they say that individ- 
uals shall take their standard rather than their own — they shape 
them after their mold and seem almost to negate a separate 
and individual being; and yet it is all part of a process by 
which independent individuals are made. The result may even 
be opposed — and yet it comes. How it comes is suggested in 
a passage which takes the form of inquiries, as follows: (1) 
How far may sympathetic and communal feelings be a lower, 
preparatory stage, at a time when personal self-feeling and 
individual initiative in valuing are not yet possible. (2) How 
far may the elevation of the collective self -feeling, the group's 
pride of distance, its sense of unlikeness tq other groups, its 
aversion to accommodation and reconciliation be a school for 
individual self-feeling — particularly to the extent it forces the 
individual to represent the pride of the whole — for he must 
speak and act with an extreme self-respect, if he represents the 
community in person (just as when the individual feels himself 
an instrument and mouthpiece of the divinity). (3) How far 
may these forms of depersonalization (Entselb stung) lend to 
the person in fact an enormous importance — higher powers 
using him (cf. the religious awe of himself which the prophet 
or poet feels). (4) How far may responsibility for the whole 
beget and authorize a wide outlook, a strict and fearful hand, 
a presence of mind and coolness, a greatness of bearing and 
demeanor, which the individual could not allow to himself on 
his own account. Nietzsche's conclusion is that collective self- 
feelings may be regarded as the great preparatory school for 
personal sovereignty, and that the higher (vornehme) class in 
any group is the one which inherits the effect of the training. 47 
The point, I need hardly say, is that standing for the organism, 
the individual comes to share its attributes — its sense of itself 
and of distinctness from all outside it, its freedom to do what 
it will, its determination to follow its own law. He has these 
feelings first representatively, but later on his own account, the 
distinction between what he is and what he has been made 
passing out of view. A strong free man, Nietzsche remarks in 
another passage, feels in himself as over against everything 
4T Will to Power, § 773; cf. Werke, XII, 114-6, § 228. 



SOCIAL MEANING OF MORALITY 223 

else the attributes of an organism, e.g., self-regulation, repara- 
tive power, assimilation, secretion and excretion, metabolic 
power, regeneration, i.e., the equivalents of these physiological 
processes; but it is a mistake, he adds, to suppose that they 
belonged to him at the start — he was at first a part of a whole, 
an organ, and only as such did the first stirrings of the general 
organic qualities come to him. That is, individuals are not 
born free and sovereign, they become so [to whatever extent 
they do become so] as the result of a social process. Hence the 
state did not originally oppress individuals — they as yet 
failed to exist. 48 "The amoeba-like unity of the individual 
comes at the end! and the philosophers started with it, as if 
it was already there!" 49 All the same individuals — organic 
unities in themselves — do come at last. Society by its own 
processes breeds those more or less independent of society, and 
morality itself helps train the future super-moral or auton- 
omous individual — this last we shall see more clearly later on. 50 

IV 

The conception of morality as entirely a social thing is 
perhaps still the dominant one. Nietzsche remarks that the 
early ages of mankind have done more to Hx its character than 
the later historical epochs 51 — and this appears to hold of its 
intellectual conceptions as well. Hegel speaks entirely in the 
spirit of the antique conception of morality, when he says that 
"the individual has his truth, real existence, and ethical status 
only in being a member of the state," that "the striving for 
a morality of one's own is futile and by its very nature im- 
possible of attainment ' ' ; and again when he says, ' ' In respect to 
morality, the saying of one of the wisest men of antiquity is 
the true one — to be moral is to live in accordance with the moral 
tradition of one 's country. ' ' 52 The latest, or, at least, best 
book which America has produced on ethics — Dewey and Tufts 's 
Ethics — has, if not the same, a similar conception. We read 
there of "moral, i.e., socialized interests"; we hear that in 

* 8 WerTce, XII, 110-2. 
"Ibid., XII, 113-4, §226. 
50 In the first part of Chapter XX. 
81 Dawn of Day, § 18; cf. Genealogy etc., Ill, §9. 
62 Philosophy of Right (tr. by Dyde), Part III, 150, and Werke, I, 
389. I borrow these references from Dewey and Tufts, op. cit., pp. 225-6. 



224 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

progressive as truly as in stationary society "the moral and 
the social are one"; that though the virtues of the individual 
in a progressive society are more reflective than in customary 
society, "they are just as socially conditioned in their origin 
and as socially directed in their manifestations ' ' ; that there is no 
attitude "which does not need to be socially valued or judged"; 
that the reconstructed individual, who is necessary in a time 
of individuals, is one "who is individual in choice, in feeling, 
in responsibility, and at the same time social in what he regards 
as good, in his sympathies and in his purposes," that "other- 
wise individualism means progress toward the immoral. ' ' M 
According to such a view, the action of an individual who pur- 
sued a good not primarily social, but personal, who looked 
upon society not as an end, but rather as a means to his own 
ends, and who marked out his own path in pursuing those ends, 
would hardly come under the head of morality at all. Pro- 
fessor Sumner, in his significantly entitled book, Folkways, 
holds even more strictly to the primitive and historic concep- 
tion, and doubts whether morality in any other sense can be 
made out. He observes, "The modern peoples have made 
morals and morality a separate domain, by the side of religion, 
philosophy, and politics. In that sense morals is an impossible 
and unreal category. It has no existence and can have none. 
The word 'moral' means what belongs or appertains to the 
mores. Therefore the category of morals can never be defined 
without reference to something outside of itself. " w It is im- 
portant for us to keep in mind this older meaning of the term, 
for when Nietzsche makes animadversions on morality, as he 
so frequently does, it is this kind of morality — what he calls 
Heer den-Moral — that he has primarily in mind. In another, 
shall I say ? more ideal, certainly more general sense, he so little 
attacks morality, that he offers a morality of his own. Because 
of these varying senses in which he uses the word, he easily 
confuses us, if we do not take a little trouble to see what he 
means. Sometimes he attacks morality without qualification, 
but this is only because already in common speech — and often 
in that of scholars as well — morality and social morality are 
absolutely identified. 

03 Op. cit., pp. 300, 434-5, 427, 75-6. Bi Op. cit., p. 37. 



SOCIAL MEANING OF MORALITY 225 

The fact is that not merely the historic conception, but the 
feelings going along with it still dominate among us. Most of 
us, Nietzsche notes, still follow social standards rather than 
our own. 55 A cold look, a wry mouth, from those among whom 
we are educated, is still feared by the strongest; and what is 
it really that we fear? Isolation. 56 k We get on with a bad 
conscience better than with a bad reputation. 57 Indeed, con- 
science itself was originally of social shaping — one condemned 
in himself what others condemned ; 58 and it is still largely so. 
Professor Dewey even says, "All men require social standards 
in their conduct : the consent of their kind. No man ever lived 
with the exclusive approval of his own conscience." 59 If it is 
urged that men have stood alone with God approving, this 
would not be an exception, for God is the socius in this case, 
and the question may be raised how far the social needs of 
those who felt obliged to stand alone have tended to create, or 
at least sustain, the faith in this invisible society. 1 

65 Dawn of Day, § 104. 
Be Joyful Science, §50. 
07 Ibid., § 52. 

68 Cf. Mixed Opinions, etc., § 90, and the close of Joyful Science, 
§149. 

69 The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy and Other Essays, p. 75. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). HAVE EVIL AND 
CRUELTY NO PLACE IN THE WORLD? 



A prime category of morality is good and evil. Every social 
group makes the distinction in some form; its power and life 
depend upon its doing so — it must favor what it feels to be 
helpful to it and oppose what is harmful, for good and evil 
have originally this utilitarian significance. So strong do the 
instinctive approbation and condemnation become that good 
is easily regarded as good per se and evil as evil per se — that 
is, the relativity of the conceptions is forgotten, and a chasm 
is put between them. Good becomes something eternally dif- 
ferent from evil ; there is no passing of one into the other, par- 
ticularly of evil into good. In other words, a moralistic scheme 
of things, an incipient metaphysics tends to arise ; and just the 
most earnest and idealistic moral natures go this way. The 
view is one which we have seen Nietzsche questioning in his 
previous period, 1 but the questioning is now more extended and 
thoroughgoing. It is difficult to separate here his analysis from 
his conclusions, and I shall scarcely attempt to. His view of 
evil I shall particularly consider; what he says of good will 
be taken up more at length later. 

The word he commonly uses is hose. It is not the same as 
ubel (which implies a more general and perhaps more objective 
judgment), 2 or as schlecht (which more or less savors of con- 
tempt). Professor Riehl remarks that hose is a peculiarly Ger- 
man word, wanting in other Aryan languages. 3 In any case it has 
a peculiar shade of meaning, to which it is well to attend. The 
idea is of active harmfulness, along with intent to harm (real 

1 See ante, p. 119. 

2 Cf., for instance, the use of Ubel in Will to Power, §§ 870, 928. 
8 Op. cit., p. 117. 

226 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 227 

or suspected) — our English expressions "evil eye," "evilly dis- 
posed" suggest it to us. The judgment is from the standpoint 
of the person affected — as Nietzsche remarks, it is a judgment 
on others. The actor may be without evil intent in fact, but 
he seems hose to the other party (the judgment easily extending 
to non-sentient or non-active things — if there are any such, to 
the mind of primitive man). If, says Nietzsche, we speak of 
anything in ourselves as hose, it is a figure of speech — what 
we mean is that there is something in us (a dangerous impulse, 
for example) which we as it were separate from ourselves, and 
say that it shall not play the master. 4 Translators of Nietzsche 
sometimes render hose by "wicked," and this would not be 
out of the way, if "wicked" kept its original etymological 
signification of \ ' witch-like, ' ' but so far as it suggests depravity, 
profligacy, and vice, it is wide of the mark. A few examples 
of his use of the word will make us see what he essentially 
means. a He speaks, for instance, of the Apostle Paul, before 
his conversion, as hard and hose toward the transgressors and 
doubters of the Jewish law, 5 and of Peter as turning on Satan 
with the hoses word, "Thou liar." 6 He characterizes as 
boshaft the irony of Socrates toward those who had the conceit 
of knowledge. 7 The Bible speaks of God as "angry with the 
wicked every day" — so far then he is base toward them (and 
Jesus was hose toward the Pharisees). Nietzsche refers to the 
supreme kindness (Gilte) of Jesus, but says also, "he was the 
boseste of all men. ' ' 8 He calls the early Christians bose to the 
old Greco-Roman view; indeed he pronounces Christianity's 
attitude toward antiquity in general the topmost reach of de- 
famatory Bosheit? He himself wanted to write a boses book 10 
[i.e., one that would be harmful and destructive in certain 

* Werke, XIV, 64, §124; cf. XII, 91, §181 {omnia naturalia af- 
firmanti sunt indifferentia, neganti vero vel abstinenti aut mala aut 
bona ) . 

5 Dawn of Day, § 68. 

8 Mixed Opinions etc., § 345. 

7 Beyond Good and Evil, § 212. 

8 Werke, XIII, 305, § 746. 

9 Genealogy etc., I, §8; Werke, XII, 171, §354. 

10 Werke, XIV, 352, § 213. Cf. what he says of his Bosheit in writing 
Dawn of Day {Werke, XIV, 401, §276), and the remark of Karl Joel, 
Nietzsche und die Romantik, p. 135, a propos of a passage from Friedrich 
Schlegel. 



228 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

directions — he could not have said an ubles or schlechtes book]. 
He had known in his own history, he tells us, how to be boshaft 
to conclusions which are bred by sickness or loneliness. 11 The 
hose or boshaft e attitude is, of course, usually somber, but it 
may be light and gay: Emerson says that for the great who 
eradicate old and foolish churches and nations — a b'oses work 
surely from the standpoint of the churches and nations affected 
— ' ' all must be as gay as the song of a canary. ' ' 12 Contemplat- 
ing the part which enmity and destruction have to play in the 
world, recognizing that it is as needful and as beneficent as 
that of love and creation, Nietzsche makes Zarathustra say, 
"to the highest goodness belongs the highest Bose," "man 
must become better and boser [not scMecJiter] — so do I 
teach." 13 

The evil which Nietzsche particularly considers is then 
essentially the same as the hostile, harmful, destructive, or at 
least threatening, fear-inspiring — this from the standpoint of 
those who suffer or fear the harm. That social groups should 
make the judgment in relation to themselves was natural and 
inevitable. Living uncertainly and precariously as they did, 
it was absolutely necessary for them to note what helped or 
harmed them — particularly what harmed. Fear of evil indeed 
predominated in the minds of primitive men — and, as they did 
not know what to expect, accident, the uncertain, the sudden 
were forms of it. 14 To diminish such fear was part of the func- 
tion of the reign of mores, for through it members of a group 
became regular and calculable to one another — this though mem- 
bers of foreign groups were still evil, i.e., incalculable to them; 
and members of their own group, so far as they anywise stood 
apart and were peculiar, were regarded in much the same light. 
Men wanted to be able to relax their tension. One is evil in 
their eyes, even apart from actual harm, if one does not allow 
them to do this, and one is good who does — particularly then 
the kindly intentioned, benevolent man, whose very look dis- 
arms suspicion. If — says Nietzsche, speaking now generally — 
we reckon up the qualities of the good man, why do they please 
us? And he answers, Because we have no need of warring 

"Werke, XIV, 387. 1S Zarathustra, II, xii; IV, xiii, § 13. 

12 Essay on "Heroism." 14 Will to Power, § 1019. 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 229 

against him, no need to exercise distrust, to be wary, to collect 
and discipline ourselves; our indolence, good-nature, levity- 
have a pleasant day. 15 At each stage of civilization, the "good 
man" is one who is undangerous and useful at the same time — 
a sort of mean: he need not be feared and yet cannot be 
despised. 16 

"Good" and "evil" have thus an entirely legitimate sig- 
nificance ; if the judgments were not made and the two things 
held quite apart, groups would be liable to perish by the way. 
But to make the judgments absolute, to condemn evil uncon- 
ditionally and wish to banish it from the world, to see no place 
for it in the total scheme of things and want only good in its 
place, is another matter. Such a view may be late in develop- 
ing, it is conditioned on reflective habits and an ardent moral 
sense, but it is almost certain to rise sooner or later and exists 
more or less today. Nietzsche questions it. I might put his 
interrogatory paradoxically thus, Is evil necessarily evil? — 
or more simply, Is evil in one sense necessarily evil in an- 
other? — or using the German words Is the Bose necessarily 
ubelf 11 

n 

Nietzsche answers by observing facts of psychology and his- 
tory. For instance, he notes that what inspires fear and may 
do harm may be a stimulant to men. If, he once says, we open 
our eye and conscience to the question where and how the 
plant "man" has hitherto grown most vigorously, we discover 
that to this end danger had to increase enormously for him, 
that his power of invention and dissimulation (his "mind") had 
to become subtle and daring through long hardship and com- 
pulsion, that his will to live had to rise to an unconditional 
will for power — in other words and more particularly, that 
severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, 
that what is evil, fearful, tyrannical, predacious, snakelike may 
serve for the elevation of the species as well as their opposites. 18 

15 Ibid., § 319. 
ie Ibid., §933. 

17 1 let iibel here stand for the simple calamitous and undesirable 
(doing so under correction). 

18 Beyond Good and Evil, § 44; cf. Will to Power, § 957. 



280 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

He accordingly draws the inference that if a higher form of 
humanity is to come in the future, great and terrible odds will 
be required — the superman will need for an antagonist a super- 
dragon. 19 One application of the general idea is made that 
decidedly jars on us, living in an age of intellectual tolerance 
as we do. In speaking of what we owe to the Christian church, 
he says that its very intolerance helped to render the European 
mind fine and supple, and that in our democratic age with free- 
dom of the press, thought becomes "plump." He thinks that 
the ancient polls was like-minded with the church and produced 
similar beneficial effects, while in the Roman Empire, when 
freedom of belief and unbelief came to be permitted, mind 
coarsened and degenerated. He speaks of the distinguished ap- 
pearance which men like Leibnitz and Abelard, Montaigne, 
Descartes and Pascal present under the regime of the church. 20 
Freedom of the press, he repeats, ruins style and finally the 
mind. "Galiani was aware of it a hundred years ago. * Free- 
dom of thought' ruins the thinker. Between hell and heaven 
and in danger of persecutions, banishments, eternal damnations, 
and ungracious looks of kings and ladies the mind was lithe 
and bold: alas! what is mind becoming today?" 21 In brief, 
danger and enmity are good for man. So strongly does he 
feel this, that he regards it as no more desirable that "good" 
men alone should inherit the earth, than that there should be 
uninterrupted good weather. 22 With blended satire and serious- 
ness he says that to ask that every one should be a ' * good man, ' ' 
V a social animal, blue-eyed, benevolent, a "beautiful soul," or 
as Herbert Spencer wishes, altruistic, would strip existence of 
its grand character and reduce mankind to a miserable China- 
dom. 23 "As the tree needed the storm, that it might become 
strong, so evil is necessary to the growth of life." 

But he goes further. Not only is evil a stimulant to life, 
it is a constituent of the life-process itself. That which we call 
evil in an animal may be for it a condition of existence — its 

19 Zarathustra, II, xxi. 

20 Werke, XIII, 310-1; cf. the general reflections in Beyond Good and 
Evil, § 188. 

21 Werke, XIV, 206, §412. 

22 Will to Power, § 386. 

2Z Ecce Homo, IV, §4; cf. Joyful Science, §373; Twilight of the 
Idols, ix, § 37. 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 231 

health and strength ma Tr lie therein. 24 The most beautiful and 
powerful beast of prey has the strongest affects ; its hatred and 
inordinate desire (Gier) are needed in this strength for its 
health, and, when satisfied, develope it magnificently. 25 The 
evil in ourselves, the things we are afraid of, are sources of 
strength, if we know how to use them. Envy and greed are 
capable of utilization — what would have become of man without 
them? Genius is egoistic, nourishing itself on others, ruling 
them, exploiting them. 26 In the pursuit of scientific truth we 
have to be now hose, now good toward things — to exercise jus- 
tice, passion, and coldness in turn. At one time by sympathy, 
at another by violence we get results ; reverence for the mystery 
of things brings one person forward, indiscretion and roguery 
in explaining mysteries another. 27 "Even for knowing I need 
all my impulses, the good and the evil, and should quickly 
reach the limit if I were not willing to be hostile, mistrustful, 
cruel, insidious, revengeful, hypocritical (mich verstellend) , 
etc., toward things." 28 There are times when we need to be 
positively malevolent, when a mild aversion leaves us weak and 
ineffective. Nietzsche comments on Goethe's Faust, a dissatis- 
fied but after all too easily compromising kind of man, in 
danger, like Germans in general, of becoming a Philistine when 
he leaves the world of thought and contemplation and enters 
that of action; "a little more musclar force and natural wild- 
ness in him, and all his virtues would become greater." He 
adds that Goethe apparently knew where the danger and weak- 
ness of his hero lay, and hints at it in words he puts into the 
mouth of Jarno to Wilhelm Meister: "You are vexed and 
bitter, that is fine and good; but when you once become right 
hose, it will be still better. ' ' * Nietzsche puts it broadly, 
"There must be enmity in a man if he is to come out in quite 
lordly fashion, all evil affects must be there " ; w he even says, 



2 * Werke, XIII, 147, § 345. 
2S Ibid., XII, 86, § 170. 
39 Ibid., XII, 123, §243. 

27 Dawn of Day, § 432. 

28 Werke, XII, 86-7; cf. XIV, 98, §210; Joyful Science, §333; Zara< 
thustra, III, xii, § 7. 

29 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 4. 
80 Werke, XI, 240, § 198. 



832 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

"the Bose is man's best force" 31 — not, indeed, the goal, as 
Professor Riehl observes, but the way to the goal 32 [i.e., a part 
of the way]. 

And when we turn from the individual and contemplate the 
general life and movement of the world, we see (Nietzsche 
thinks) that destruction has its part to play there as well as 
construction or conservation — and malevolence, the Bose, is only 
a name for the destructive force and spirit. 33 It is necessary 
to distinguish between what upholds a group, and what ad- 
vances the species, raises the type. 34 The social virtues — mutual 
consideration and friendliness, respect for authority, reverence 
for law and custom — strengthen and solidify an existing group, 
but they do not change its character; and if there is to be 
change, either the group must be refashioned, or the new type 
be reached through its disintegration or destruction. In the 
one case as in the other, those who attempt to make the change 
seem evil forces to the group as it is. A foreign conqueror is 
the very impersonation of evil to a group, and those who pro- 
pound strange ideas at home are almost equally objects of sus- 
picion and dread. Moreover, they may be spirits of destruction. 
To what extent wish to benefit mingles with malice in individual 
cases may be difficult to determine — but Nietzsche thinks that 
malice plays its part. Departure from ancient custom has 
often come, he remarks, not so much from better intelligence as 
from strong malicious impulses — the heretic being something 
like a witch in the pleasure he takes in harming what is estab- 
lished (whether men or opinions). 35 The instinct for seeing 
things dissolve, wanton skepticism, pleasure in adventure, even 
personal spite and revenge have contributed to progress, and 
it must be forgiven those so inspired, if on occasion they posed 
as "martyrs to the truth." 36 And whether initiators of change 
are malicious, or only wish change in order that their group 
may be better preserved, 15 they seem bose to those near them — 
and actually are bose to things as they are. Indeed, if change 

S1 Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 5. 

82 Op. cit., pp. 97-8. 

33 Cf. Werke, XII, 86, § 170. 

"Joyful Science, §4; cf. Werke, XIII, 142, §329. 

85 Joyful Science, § 35. 

30 Will to Power, § 45. 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 233 

is a part of the normal working of the world, malevolent as 
well as benevolent impulses belong of necessity to its inner 
machinery. One who is pious to the past and one who is sin- 
cerely impious alike have their place. 37 Destroying a part of 
becoming, endangering people and their views, or even putting 
an end to them, as necessary from any high point of view as 
being useful to them and building them up, destroying values 
and standards of value too, destroying moralities, religions- 
such is the logic of the development of things, to Nietzsche's 
mind. 38 A perfect adjustment of everything to everything else 
and to itself (as is suggested by Spencer) is an erroneous ideal — 
it would involve the deepest impoverishment of existence. 39 As 
it is, adjustment may go too far, groups last too long, the social 
virtues be too supreme — the harm of the virtues, Nietzsche 
ironically remarks, is something that has not yet been pointed 
out! 40 But the evil dispositions are well-lodged in the world, 
and he takes comfort in the fact. 41 

So far does he go in this direction that he uses language 
at times almost like that of a theodicy. Good and evil seem to 
him obverse sides of the strong force that keeps the world 
moving and alive; they go together — the root of both (save 
where "good" really spells "weak") being strength. 42 c If, as 
is urged by those who investigate morality from a physiologico- 
historical standpoint, the survival of the moral instincts proves 
that they are useful for the preservation of the species, by the 
same token the survival of the unmoral instincts proves their 
utility — only that the will in their case is not simply a will for 
preservation, but for advance, for something more. 43 Nothing 
that exists ought to be suppressed, nothing is superfluous. 44 He 
even speaks of a new justice to evil and evil men. "Also the 
evil man (der Bose), also the unhappy man, also the man who 
is an exception shall have his philosophy, his good right, his 

87 Mixed Opinions, etc., § 93. 

88 Cf. Werke, XIII, 221, §527; XIV, 350, §208; Joyful Science, §4; 
Ecce Homo, IV, § 2. 

39 Werke, XII, 86, § 170; cf. Joyful Science, § 1. 

40 Werke, XII, 93, §§ 186-7. 

41 Ibid., XIII, 147, §343; cf. Zarathustra, IV, xiii, §5; Will to 
Power, §747; Werke, XII, 134, §260. 

42 Werke, XIII, 147, § 344. 

43 Ibid., XIII, 141-2, § 329. 

44 Ecce Homo, III, i, § 2. 



234 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

sunshine! It is not pity here that is needed . . . but 'a new 
justice/ " 45 The ideal philosopher of the future will exercise 
"the great justice' ' and courteously protect and defend what- 
ever is misunderstood and defamed, whether it be God or 
Devil. 46 With all this defense of evil, however, good has the 
supreme place in Nietzsche's estimation. From this standpoint 
he says that the task of culture is to take all that is fearful 
into service, singly, tentatively, step by step, although till it is 
strong enough to do this, it must needs fight or even curse it. 47 
In short, evil is not to be destroyed, but turned to account. He 
even makes the venturesome statement, "all good is an evil of 
yesterday that has been made serviceable. " 48 I have already 
cited his language about himself: "I am by far the most fearful 
man that ever existed, which does not exclude my becoming the 
most beneficent. ' ' ® 

ni 

Nietzsche enlarges on the aspect of fearfulness which great 
men in particular may have. We do not separate, he says, the 
great from the fearful. 50 Great men were so through the 
strength of their affects; a measure of individuals and peoples 
is how far they can unchain the most fearful impulses without 
going to pieces — turning them to their advantage instead and 
making them bear fruit in act and work. 51 Zarathustra fears 
that the half-formed higher men who come to him would call 
his superman devil, as there would be something terrible in 
his goodness. 52 In Napoleon the higher and the fearful man 
were united ; the mightiest instinct, that of life itself, the desire 
to rule, affirmed itself in him, 53 though he was corrupted by the 
means he had to use and lost noblesse of character. 54 The good, 
the noble, and the great (all different categories) rarely come 

48 Joyful Science § 289 

"Beyond Good and Evil, §213; cf. Werhe, XIII, 118, § 161; Will to 
Power, § 1015. « 

4T Will to Power, § 1025; cf. § 896. 

49 Ibid., § 1025. 

49 Ecce Homo, IV, § 2. 

50 Will to Power, § 1015. 

"Werke, XII, 87, §170; XIII, 122, §272. 
62 Zarathustra, II, xxi. 

83 Will to Power, § 1017. 

84 Ibid., § 1026. 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 2.S5 

together in the same individual — Nietzsche could point to but 
one instance in the nineteenth century, Mazzini. 55 ''Good" 
differs from " great' ' because in the great man [as such] the 
specific qualities of life in general, such as wrong, deception, 
exploitation, reach their maximum — although when they have 
been overpowering, their essential nature is not perceived and 
they are then construed as "good" — Carlyle being an instance 
of this type of interpreter. 56 ' ' The high individual gives himself 
on occasion all the rights the state assumes — the right to kill, 
to annihilate, to play the spy, etc."; men of this type have 
committed all crimes — whether legally so or not, depending on 
the temper of the times. 57 The crimes need not be obvious 
animal ones, but more subtle, such as treachery, apostasy, 
denial; higher natures none the less commit them. 58 "The 
great are not understood: they forgive themselves every 
crime, but no weakness. " 59 In other words, they have 
and make their own law, and this is what makes them 
great — and dreaded. Nietzsche quotes a Chinese proverb, 
"The great man is a public misfortune" — and he thinks 
that it is not so paradoxical as it sounds. At bottom all 
civilizations have, he says, this deep anxiety about the "great 
man," though the Chinese alone confess it — and they arrange 
their institutions "so that he shall arise as seldom, and grow 
up under as unfavorable conditions, as possible: what wonder! 
The small have looked out for themselves, for the small ! " w 
I need not now develope the compensatory thought of the ulti- 
mate beneficence of great men; it has been already stated, and 
will be and more fully again — I simply note the evil aspect 
which for the time being, as Nietzsche thinks, they almost inevi- 
tably wear. "As man is something less than the animal and 
something more (Unthier und tJberthier) , the higher man is 
something less and something more than man {Unmensch und 
Ubermensch) : so do things go together. With every growth 
of man in the direction of what is great and high he grows also 
in the direction of what is deep and fearful; the one result 
should not be desired without the other — or, rather, the more 

88 Werke, XII, 81, § 156. 88 Ibid., XIV, 79, § 154. 

68 Will to Power, § 968. "Ibid., XIV, 79, § 153. 

87 Werke, XIV, 80-1, § 160; 78, § 153. eo Ibid., XII, 119, § 232. 



236 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

thoroughly the one is desired, the more thoroughly the other 
is attained." 61 

rv 

If a view like this strikes us strangely, still more strange 
will seem what is said of cruelty. Cruelty might be called evil 
carried to the highest power; it is "disinterested malice/ ' or, 
in the language of Spinoza, sympathia malevolens* 2 The cruel 
man not only produces harm and suffering, he likes to. Nietz- 
sche remarks that one may cause suffering to another, without 
meaning to — this being often the case with the strong ; but that 
weak persons evilly-minded want to produce suffering and to 
see the signs of it. 63 Still the strong may be cruel too. 

Probably nothing in Nietzsche's teaching has given more 
offense than his supposed advocacy of cruelty — Professor Riehl 
speaks of it as a morbid trait in his character. 64 But his attitude 
in the first instance is that of the psychological and historical 
analyst. There are no signs of his having been in the ordinary 
sense of the word a cruel man. I shall speak of this later in 
discussing his views of pity. Once he calls it our hereditary 
sin that we enjoy little, saying that if we learned better how 
to enjoy, we should unlearn giving and meditating pain to 
others. 65 Plainly this indicates no natural sympathy with 
cruelty. It is another thing, however, to say that there is no 
place for it in the world. 

Cruelty is willing infliction of suffering — or at least, willing- 
ness to witness it. Let us note first what Nietzsche says of 
suffering, then of the infliction of it. Schopenhauer had used 
the facts of suffering as an argument against the world. Chris- 
tianity also finds suffering an objection — its ideal is of an order 
in which "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain." 66 Nietzsche 

81 Will to Power, § 1027. 

02 Genealogy etc., II, § 6. 

63 Dawn of Day, §371. On the need of decadents and the nervously 
weak for spice (Pfeffer) and even cruelty, cf. Will to Power, § 119. 

84 Op. cit., p. 98. 

65 Zarathustra, II, iii. Cf. other passages cited later in the discussion 
of pity, pp. 303-4. 

06 Apocalypse, xxi, 4. Cf. Nietzsche's comment on Christianity, Will 
to Power, § 1025. 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 237 

thinks differently. He finds a vital meaning in pain, something 
without which life, particularly progressive life, could hardly 
be. He notes the curious fact, which may be taken for what it 
is worth, that primitive man looked on suffering differently 
from ourselves, even finding a pleasure at times in witnessing 
it, and a still greater pleasure in causing it. 67 He notes too 
that on the sufferer himself pain may act in two ways — or 
rather in three: if he is not strong enough, it may undo him, 
but if he is sufficiently strong, it may either serve as a warning 
to take in sail, or act as a positive stimulus and challenge, 
leading him to put forth his highest power. Some, he remarks, 
are never prouder or more warlike than before great pain. 68 A 
well-made individual finds illnesses to be the greatest stimulants 
of his life. 69 Nietzsche makes a striking portrayal of the way 
in which sickness may strike inward and lead one to face the 
last realities of existence, in § 144 of Dawn of Day. ' ' I know 
not," he says elsewhere, " whether such suffering make better, 
but I know that it makes deeper." 70 He raises the question 
whether even for the development of our virtue sickness and 
suffering can be dispensed with, and whether especially our 
thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge does not require the 
sick soul as well as the healthy one — whether the will for health 
alone is not a prejudice and a cowardice. 71 One may even come 
out of these hells with a new love and a new sense of love — and 
understand Dante 's meaning, when he wrote over the gates of his 
Inferno, "Also me did eternal love create." 72 The bitter experi- 
ences may not be good for all, may submerge some, but for the 
strong they bring on the "great health." 73 In this connection 
Nietzsche has a good word for Christianity, saying that in 
contrast with all utilitarianism, aiming ultimately at well- 
being, comfort, pleasure, it teaches that life is a testing and 
education of the soul, and that there is danger in all well- 

67 Genealogy etc., II, §6; cf. §7; also Werke, XI, 197-8, §106; 
Dawn of Day, § 18. 

68 Joyful Science, § 318; cf. Will to Power, § 778. 
89 Will to Power, § 1003. 

70 Preface, §3, to Joyful Science. 

71 Joyful Science, §1120; cf. Genealogy etc., Ill, §9. 

72 Will to Power, § 1030. 
i* Ibid., § 1013. 



238 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

being. 74 He speaks of the discipline of great suffering, and 
asks whether he himself is not more indebted to the most dif- 
ficult years of his life than to any others. 75 He had early 
quoted Meister Eckhard's words, "The animal that carries you 
quickest to perfection is suffering, ' ' 76 and he came to know their 
truth by experience/ 3 There is then a place for suffering in the 
world. It belongs almost inevitably to processes of change and 
new creation. Pain like pleasure is but an incident, a sign — 
the matter of moment is what it accompanies or signifies. If 
we are to make ourselves over, we must pay the price and not 
be too pathetic about it. 77 The highest thing is to have courage 
to suffer. e But may we choose, inflict suffering? With this, 
however, we pass to cruelty itself. 

Whoever is willing to suffer himself, Nietzsche observes, 
looks differently at cruelty; he does not regard it as in itself 
harmful and bad (schlecht). Further, "the cruelty of an un- 
feeling person is the opposite of pity; the cruelty of one who 
is sensitive is a higher potency of pity. ' ' 78 But before noting 
his estimate of cruelty, let us follow what he has further to say 
in analysis of it. He speaks of man as the cruellest animal — 
the cruellest also to himself. 79 If the question is raised why 
there is pleasure in inflicting pain, he can only answer that 
there goes with it a sense of superiority or power. The pleasure 
is greater when one has been relatively powerless before, when, 
for example, one has been injured and now takes revenge. 80 It 
is greater, too, the lower we are in the social scale, i.e., the less 
we are accustomed to the assertion of power. For example, a 
low-born creditor in ancient times had a quite extraordinary 
pleasure in inflicting harm on an insolvent debtor — for the mo- 
ment he participated in master-rights. 81 In general, as already 
stated, cruelty is greater in the weak than in the strong. 82 But 

14 Werke, XIII, 151, §§357-8. He has English Utilitarianism par- 
ticularly in mind. 

75 Beyond Good and Evil, §225; Epilogue to "Nietzsche contra 
Wagner." 

7 8 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 4. 

71 Beyond Good and Evil, §225; cf. Zarathustra, II, ii. 

78 Werke, XII, 295, § 334; 296, § 339. 

78 Zarathustra, III, xiii, § 2. 

80 Werke, XIII, 190, § 420. 

81 Genealogy etc., II, § 5. 

82 Cf., in addition to the earlier references, Werke, XII, 88-9, §173; 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 239 

the impulse is widespread, and lurks in guises where we may 
not suspect it. Civilization refines, spiritualizes [shall I say? 
moralizes] it, rather than eradicates it. 83 Christianity has been 
one of the spiritualizing influences. The idea of hell, the rack, 
courts of inquisition, auto-da-fes, are, whatever may be said 
against them, a great advance on the splendid, but half -idiotic 
slaughtering that went on in the Roman arenas. 84 It is a step 
onward when men are content with spiritual instead of bodily 
sufferings, and with picturing them and no longer wishing to 
see them. 85 One of the guises under which cruelty lurks is the 
desire for distinction — the unconscious or at least unconfessed 
motive being, Nietzsche thinks, to make others feel unpleasantly 
the contrast with ourselves. The artist, whose pleasure in 
forcing the envy of competitors does not allow his forces to 
sleep till he becomes great, the nun who looks with punishing 
eyes on women who live differently, the humble, very humble 
man who is not unaware of the reproaches which others must 
give themselves for not being like him, are instances. The 
original motives may be forgotten, but down at bottom a 
subtle cruelty has been at work. 86 f 

We may even be cruel to ourselves, in a subtle way. To 
criticise others is common — apparently it is an unfailing spring 
of pleasure for men and for women ; but the philosopher — a rare 
species — criticises himself, and in a sense has pleasure in this 
also. He enjoys correcting his surface views, breaking up old 
satisfactions. It may sound nice to speak of excessive "hon- 
esty," "love of truth," "sacrifice for knowledge," but the indi- 
vidual himself, if schooled in introspection and strictly truthful, 
is apt to say, "There is something cruel in the propensity of 
my mind." 87 All conquests of knowledge come from courage 
and from hardness to oneself. 88 Nietzsche honors the English 
psychologists who know how to hold their heart as well as their 

XIV, 82, §163; Genealogy etc., I, §7 (on the specific character of 
priestly revenge ) . 

83 Genealogy etc., II, § 6. 

84 Werke, XIII, 310, § 759. 

85 Ibid., XII, 89, § 176. 

86 Dawn of Day, §§ 30, 113. 

87 Beyond Good and Evil, §230. Cf., on the inability to see sub- 
limated forms of a thing, Werke, XII, 87, § 172. 

88 Will to Power, § 104. 



240 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

pain in cheek, and have trained themselves to sacrifice wishes 
to truth, even to ugly, disagreeable, unchristian, unmoral 
truth. 89 He finds our strong sides unmerciful to our weak sides 
generally — yes, our very greatness may lie in our unmerciful- 
ness. 90 The ground-law of life is self-overcoming — we have to 
put away what is weak and old in us and be inexorable in doing 
so: it is the secret both of bodily and of spiritual renewal. 91 
William James spoke of "imperative goods,' ' whose nature it 
is to be "cruel to their rivals/' and Nietzsche says, "Whoever 
has greatness is cruel to his virtues and reflections (Erwag- 
ungen) of lesser rank." 92 There is something cruel in con- 
science itself. When man comes under the ban of society and 
social law, he sooner or later turns against his old nature, con- 
tradicts it, despises it, mistreats it, and makes it suffer — the 
process being intensified under the influence of ethical, ascetic 
religions like Brahmanism and Christianity. Denying self, 
sacrificing self, pleasure in doing this — all is a refined, elevated 
cruelty; 93 and the motive is the same as that behind cruelty in 
its crudest forms — love of superiority and power. That we can 
put ourselves under our feet gives us a sense of wings: in the 
famous story of King Vicvamitra which the Brahmans tell, the 
long-continued, self-inflicted sufferings of the king give him 
such a feeling of power, such confidence in himself, that he is 
ready to build a new heavens. 94 

Cruelty being of this nature, capable of these metamorphoses, 
Nietzsche thinks there is a place for it in the world, as for the 
Bose in general. In a realm of change such as our world is, 
more or less of it has to be — without it change would be im- 
possible. As pleasure is a sign of adjustment, so pain is neces- 
sary for a readjustment — if we are "humanitarian" purely, 
we faint before the stern requirements of the task; creative 
force and "humanity" are so far opposites. 95 If it is heroic 
to endeavor to diminish pain, it may on occasion also be heroic — 
and it is a harder heroism — to inflict it: in the one case we 

89 Genealogy etc., I, § 1. 

90 Joyful Science, § 28. 

91 Zarathustra, passim; Joyful Science, § 26. 

92 Joyful Science, § 266. 

93 Genealogy etc., II, § 18. 

6 * Dawn of Day, §113; Genealogy etc., Ill, §10. 
95 Cf. Werke, XIV, 70, § 136. 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 241 

follow feelings that are instinctive to most of us, in the other 
we have to transcend them. "Who will attain anything great, 
if he does not feel within himself the power and the will to inflict 
great pain ? Ability to suffer is the smallest thing : in this weak 
women and even slaves often come to mastery. But not to 
perish of inner distress and uncertainty, when we inflict great 
suffering and hear the cry of this suffering — that is great, that 
belongs to greatness. " 96 As illness, whether of body or soul 
and particularly of the soul, is instructive, sometimes more so 
than health, so those who make ill may be as necessary as 
medicine-men and saviours. 97 Nietzsche says boldly, "To lessen 
suffering and to escape from suffering (i.e., from life) — is that 
moral? To create suffering — for oneself and others — in order 
to enable them to reach the highest life, that of the conqueror — 
were my aim. ' ' w g For to his mind, it is not suffering that is 
evil, but senseless suffering, and he throws out the extraordinary 
idea that we must take upon ourselves all the suffering that 
has been borne, whether by men or by animals, and affirm it and 
have an aim in which it acquires reason. He calls it his prin- 
cipal doctrine, that "in our power lies the reinterpretation of 
suffering into blessing, of poison into nourishment. ' ' " 

Nietzsche is quite aware of the unsettling effect of considera- 
tions like these. Once he says that if we are led to feel that 
' ' evil ' ' forces are fundamentally necessary in the total economy 
of life and hence must be heightened, not lessened, if life is to 
advance, we suffer as from seasickness. 100 The trouble is, I need 
not say, that we have not been accustomed to seeing good and 
evil in perspective, that we look on them and the contrast be- 
tween them as absolute. Strong feeling always tends to abso- 
lutize its judgments — and perhaps there has been no stronger 
feeling in the world in the past than group-feeling, of which 
we thus experience the effects. But there is no real contradic- 
tion between saying that certain things are prejudicial to, or 
even incompatible with, the life of a group, and that they may 
be useful in larger relations. There is no question, and Nietz- 

96 Joyful Science, § 325. 

97 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 9. 

98 Werke, XIV, 81, § 162. 

"Werfce (pocket ed.), VII, 494, §§68-9. 
100 Beyond Good and Evil, § 23. 



242 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

sche makes no question, that societies live by what I have ven- 
tured to call essential morality, that in all ordinary circum- 
stances their members are strictly bound by it. But if the 
course of the world were determined by this morality, that 
would be something ordinary indeed. If we deny the hose 
forces — those that bring harm and suffering — all play, we in 
effect accept the world as we find it, wishing only to preserve 
it or develope it along existing lines. If there is to be change, 
great change, these forces must be allowed room. 



Indeed, Nietzsche is skeptical of absolute antitheses in gen- 
eral — that of good and evil is only a special case. He calls the 
belief in them the ground-belief of metaphysicians — meaning 
by this apparently that higher things, when contrasted abso- 
lutely with lower things, become incapable of derivation from 
them, and hence to explain them as they appear, we must posit 
another, higher order of things. 101 h He questions absolute an- 
titheses all along the line. Instinct and consciousness are not 
really opposites; consciousness may be secretly guided by in- 
stinct and forced by it into certain paths. 102 Health and sick- 
ness are not really, or at least necessarily, opposed; a measure 
of health is the efflorescence of the body, the elasticity, courage, 
and joyfulness of the mind, i.e., the extent to which sickness 
may be endured, overcome, and made tributary to health : sick- 
ness may be a stimulus to the ' ' great health. ' ' 103 Even truth, 
at least what we call such, is so little opposed to error, that it 
has grown out of it, our "true world" being the result of a 
simplification, i.e., of leaving some things out of account, ignor- 
ing them, willing to ignore them, our science being not so much 
the antithesis of ignorance, as a refinement of it, the will to 
know resting on a much more powerful will not to know. 104 
The state as a reign of law is contrasted with force and violence, 
but it originated in force and violence — it is a finer form of 
them, not their negation. 105 The early morality of mores had 

101 Ibid., §2. 

102 Ibid., §3. 

103 WW to Power, § 1013. 

104 Beyond Good and Evil, §§2, 24. 

108 Genealogy etc., II, §17; cf. Werke, IX, 148-58. 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 243 

much that was hard, tyrannous, stupid about it; all the same 
by it man was educated and turned into a reckonable, responsi- 
ble creature. 106 Some of our highest and purest moral concep- 
tions, such as duty, responsibility, obligation, have (as we shall 
see later) the trail of blood on them. From impulses of hatred 
and revenge in ancient Israel— hatred of what was great and 
powerful — came a new love, the deepest and sublimest kind of 
love, not as a contradiction but as a climax, for by the doctrine 
of love the old powers were dethroned and the revenge accom- 
plished. 107 High things grow from low things everywhere. 
Good conscience had bad conscience for a first stage. 108 Man 
descends, or ascends, from the animal — he is a higher animal. 
His mental and moral processes are not antithetical to physi- 
ological or vital processes, but a transmutation, sublimation of 
them, a carrying them to finer issues. Mind and body alike 
appropriate, absorb, and reject what is not appropriable. Man 
is after everything, everybody that can serve for his nourish- 
ment, and the impulse to own is but a form of this craving; 
knowledge is in turn a form of ownership, and love a feeling 
for what we own, or wish to own. Nietzsche suggests that all 
moral impulses may possibly be traced back to the wish to have 
and to hold; in any case, the four Socratic virtues — justice, 
prudence, self-control, courage — have beginnings in the animal 
world, are the result of the impulses for food and for escaping 
enemies, and it may not be unpermissible to designate the whole 
moral phenomenon as animal. 109 

So good and evil are not really antithetical. The mind has 
been educated, sharpened in the past by distinguishing between 
them, 110 and the distinction has its validity, but it is not an 
absolute validity. Good and evil are complementary more than 
opposite. 111 Each is necessary, useful, good (in the final sense). 
Let us be naturalistic, says Nietzsche, and concede a good right 
even to what we have to contend with, whether within or 

109 Genealogy etc., II, § 2. 
10T Ibid., I, § 8. 

108 Mixed Opinions etc., § 90. 

10 *Werke, XII, 101-7, §§205-8, 215, 216; Dawn of Day, §26. 

110 Werlce, XIV, 97, § 206. 

111 Will to Poicer, §351; cf. §1027. Nietzsche finds also ration- 
ality and mysticism complementary, see ibid., § 1012; Werke, XI, 234, 
§ 189. 



244 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

without ns. 112 In a similar strain, an American poet describes 
the Puritan: 

" I have no love of ease ! 
My feet are shod with might! 
If there's no Devil in God's world, 
Then what have I to fight? 

I am a man of war ! 
Such things I understand : 
When Devils against Cherubim 
Are leagued throughout the land." 118 

Nietzsche spoke of conjuring up enemies — we need them for 
our ideal's sake. The educator, if he is great, is like nature — 
he piles up obstacles that they may be surmounted. 114 More 
than this, the evil may become good. Lay a highest aim on 
your passions, Nietzsche says, and they become your virtues 
and sources of delight; even if you have the blood of the 
choleric or of the voluptuous or of the fanatical or of the vin- 
dictive in you, the result will be the same, the devils will become 
your angels. 115 Instincts of murder, theft, cruelty, deception 
are present in the most admired actions and characters. 1161 
Good acts are sublimated evil ones, the stuff being the same. 117 
Though we must protect ourselves against wild energies and 
call them evil, so long as we do not know how to use them, 
when we make them serviceable, they are good. 118 What we 
now honor as philosophical impulses — those to doubt, inquire, 
analyze, compare — went for a long time against the primary 
requirements of morality and conscience ; marriage at the outset 
was a sinning against the rights of the community; gentle, 
sympathetic feelings once excited contempt, it being as much a 
cause of shame to be mild then as it is now to be hard. 119 And 
in turn, good things may become evil. From this point of 

112 Werke, XIII, 121, §270. 

113 Anna Hempstead Branch, "The Puritan," in The Shoes that 
Danced (Boston, 1906). 

114 Werke, XIV, 274, §§ 66, 68. 

115 Zarathnstra, I, v. 

110 Werke, XII, 87, §171. 

117 Human, etc., § 107. 

118 Will to Power, § 1025; cf. Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 5; Werke, XIII, 
122, § 274; Beyond Good and Evil, § 116. 

116 Genealogy etc., Ill, §9. 



EVIL AND CRUELTY 245 

view, Nietzsche once speaks of evil as an atavism of a former 
good; acts, once done innocently, become evil, crimes, to the 
conscience of a later time. 120j Moreover, what is good for one 
individual is evil for another. Steady industry is not good for 
the perfect artist, habits of obedience are out of place in one 
who commands, resignation does not befit one with a great aim, 
though such things are all desirable for men in general. Even 
for the same individual, good and evil may change at different 
epochs of his life — the magnanimous feelings shared by Na- 
poleon in his youth with his time became seductions and tempta- 
tions later on, since they weakened the exclusive application 
of his force in one direction which then was necessary. 121 Nietz- 
sche himself wished to turn some things now commonly counted 
good into evil. 122 He even speaks once or twice, though rather 
obscurely, of what is useful in one direction being neces- 
sarily evil in others, so that a thing may be good and evil 
at the same time, depending on the standpoint from which it 
is regarded. 123 However this may be, good and evil are to his 
mind relative judgments only — evil does not inhere in things 
themselves or in men themselves. With a certain humanity 
Zarathustra turns on judges who pass sentence on the "pale 
criminal," charging them, "Enemy" shall ye say, but not "vil- 
lain," "sick man" shall ye say, but not "wretch" (Schuft), 
"fool" shall ye say, but not "sinner." 124 



120 Werke, XII, 91, § 182. 

121 Ibid., XIV, 64, §125. 



122 Cf. the strong language of Genealogy etc., II, § 24. 

123 Werke, XIII, 147, §§ 345, 348. 
12 * Zarathustra, I, vi. 



CHAPTER XIX 

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cost.). VARYING TYPES OF 

MORALITY 



In introducing some paragraphs on "the natural history of 
morals" in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche urges the necessity 
of making a collection of different types of morality. While 
admitting that moral feeling in Europe is subtle, many-sided, 
sensitive, refined, "the science of morals' ' seems to him still 
young, tyro-like, clumsy {plump) — even the word * 'science' ' 
in this connection being presumptuous and against good taste, 
which is always a taste in the first place for modest expressions. 
A preliminary need, he urges, is to gather material, to grasp 
conceptually and classify an immense domain of delicate valua- 
tions and distinctions of value, which live, grow, propagate, 
and die — and to try, perhaps, to make detailed pictures of the 
recurring and more frequent forms of this living crystalliza- 
tion. But instead of such work, for which no hand could be 
too fine, philosophers, whenever they have addressed themselves 
to morals as a science, have demanded of themselves, with 
pedantic and amusing gravity, something far higher, more pre- 
tentious, more solemn, a basis of morality — and all think that 
they have provided one; but morality itself passed as some- 
thing "given." The fact is, however, that they have only 
known the moral facta roughly (groblich), in some arbitrary 
abstract or some accidental abridgment, perhaps as the morality 
of their environment, their class, their church, their time, their 
climate and zone — and just because they have been so poorly 
instructed and were so little curious in respect to peoples, eras, 
and past ages, they have not come face to face with the real 
problems of morality, which first arise in connection with a 
comparison of many moralities. 1 

1 Beyond Good and Evil, § 186. 
246 



VARYING TYPES OF MORALITY 247 

The expression "many moralities" doubtless seems strange 
to many — and we have found Nietzsche himself giving a some- 
what definite characterization of morality in the chapter before 
the last. But though morality is always the law of a social 
group, and in certain essential points tends to be the same 
everywhere, it may vary to the extent different groups are dif- 
ferently situated and have different needs, or to the extent they 
have different specific aims. All must value and have tables 
of good and evil, but these need not be exactly alike. Indeed, 
so far as a group is peculiar, whether in its circumstances or 
its ideals, it must value differently from other groups, otherwise 
the development of its own individual life will not be secured. 
Nietzsche essays a brief characterization of the moralities of the 
Greeks, the Persians, the Jews, and the Germans — so far as 
each has its peculium — in a discourse of Zarathustra. "Ever 
shalt thou be the first and excel others, no one shall thy jealous 
soul love but a friend" — such was the distinctive spirit of 
Hellenic morality; with this the Greek went on his path of 
greatness. "To speak truth, and use the bow and arrow 
well" — this seemed pre-eminently good to the Persians. "To 
honor father and mother and to be obedient to them 
down to the depths of one's soul" — this was the maxim, 
by obeying which Israel became strong and immortal. "To 
practise fidelity, and for the sake of fidelity to risk honor and 
blood even in hosen and dangerous courses" — so saying, the 
German people mastered itself and became pregnant with great 
hopes. 2 Moralities like these are, of course, group-moralities 
proper. But there may also be minor groups within the group — 
social classes of various sorts; and these too may have their 
peculiar situations, needs, and aims. We speak colloquially 
now of the morality of the various professions, of the morality 
of business, of that of family life and so on. It is observable 
that individuals even acquire different characters to a certain 
extent, depending on the nature and aims of the class to which 
they belong. We can imagine that if some of these minor 
groups disappeared, they might leave their impress in ways of 
speaking and looking at things that should survive them — so 
that if men in future times were keen enough of scent, they 
2 Zarathustra, I, xv. 



248 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

might construct more or less of a picture of the vanished group 
from data before them. Royal institutions might thus be recon- 
structed after an age of democracy nad set in. The family 
institution might be reconstructed after the family had disap- 
peared (if that could ever be). 

n 

It appears to have been in some such way as this that 
Nietzsche was led to the supposition of an original master- 
morality and slave-morality. Such distinct things do not 
exist now, but he fancied that they had existed. He was 
not an original investigator in history or sociology, but 
he was a wide reader, and had a keen scent for the 
meaning, and shades of meaning, of words. In wandering 
through the many moralities both finer and ruder, which have 
ruled hitherto on the earth or still rule, he thought he detected 
certain traits regularly recurring together and connected with 
one another; and at last two ground-types disclosed themselves 
and a fundamental distinction appeared — there was a morality 
of the master or ruling class and one of the slave or subject 
class. He found survivals of these moralities among us today — 
there are contrasted ways of feeling and judging and even of 
speaking, that appeared to him to receive their natural explana- 
tion in this way. Sometimes the contrasted standpoints are 
harmonized (at least attempts are made to harmonize them), 
sometimes they simply co-exist; they may co-exist in the same 
individual, who now judges in one way and now in another — it 
is a part of the criss-cross, the anarchy, of the present moral 
situation,* as he saw it, to which allusion has been made. He 
found also another type of morality — that of the priestly class. 
The good and evil of the priestly class were at bottom identical 
with the pure and impure — the terms having been understood 
at the start not so much in a symbolical, as in a simple physical 
sense. A man was "pure" who bathed himself, who forbade 
himself foods that caused diseases of the skin, who did not 
cohabit with unclean women of the lower class, who had a 
horror of blood — not more than this, at least not much more. 
In the course of time, "pure" came to have the moral and 
spiritual meanings with which we are all familiar — yet even 






VARYING TYPES OF MORALITY 24,9 

so there is always the lurking suggestion of a contrast to the 
ordinary tainted world. 3 b But the moral types which Nietzsche 
considers at length are those of the ruler and subject classes. 
As he read history, this social cleavage is the most striking one — 
the one that has left the deepest marks. The cleavage does not 
exist in democratic communities, and if the world had started 
and developed democratically, " master-morality " and " slave- 
morality" would have no meaning. 

It should be said at the outset that " master" and " slave' ' 
are not used by Nietzsche merely in the economic sense to which 
we in America are most accustomed, but, as has been hinted 
in an earlier connection, 4 broadly. The economic slave who is 
captured in war or purchased and put to drudgery in the 
fields or in the household is one kind of slave, but that which 
makes him a slave is subjection to the will of another — and 
virtually every one who takes his orders from another, and 
has to, gets this designation at Nietzsche's hands/ 3 The master 
(Herr), on the other hand, is one who gives orders. And inas- 
much as early political societies were commonly made up of 
leaders and the led, rulers and the ruled, the function of the 
latter being as much to follow and obey as that of the former 
was to lead and command, the language " master and slave," 
in application to them, is strictly appropriate. Particularly 
does it apply when one society conquers another, which seems 
to have been the way in which large political aggregates were 
formed in early times. Nietzsche once goes so far as to say 
that classes (Stdnde) always originate in differences of descent 
and race. 5 But this appears to be a needlessly strong statement. 
" Slave morality" and "the morality of the mass" are prac- 
tically synonymous to him, and the "mass" in contrast with 
the rulers or leaders belonged to every social group — the two 
are constantly contrasted and their virtues and duties contra- 
distinguished by him. 6 Sometimes he even uses "group-moral- 
ity" (Heer den-Moral) as identical with "slave-morality," 
meaning of course that the "slaves" are the greater part of 
the group, just as we often speak of the "people," when we 

8 Genealogy etc., I, §§6-8. 
4 P. 72; cf., later, pp. 442-3. 

Genealogy etc., Ill, § 17. Cf. N. Awxentieff's comment, Kultur- 
eihisches Ideal Nietzsches, p. 85. 



250 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

mean the common people, or of a flock of sheep and its bell- 
wether, or of a herd of cattle and its "Yor-ochsen."* In times 
past there have been the few rulers and the many ruled — this 
is the simple broad fact on which Nietzsche's view of a master- 
morality and a slave-morality is based. For us today ' 'slave' ' 
is a derogatory expression, and always, it is true, a slave has 
ranked lower than a free man; but Nietzsche knows also how 
to appreciate the slave — and even says that many a man has 
thrown away his last worth when he threw away his servitude. 7 
How necessary and vital in his estimation the slave class has 
been in the past, how necessary and vital their counterparts 
are today and always will be, we shall see later. 8 I pass now to 
a more detailed characterization of the two moral types. 9 

First, the ruler morality. It is evident that the ruler class 
of men are a marked type. They have unusual vigor, enter- 
prise, courage, vitality generally; they are, relatively speaking, 
higher, more complete men. Their ascendency can hardly be 
accounted for otherwise — they take the first place, because they 
are the first. They delight in war, adventure, the hunt, the 
dance, contents of skill — it is from the overflow .of the energy 
within them. 10 Theirs is not ordinary labor in the fields or the 
household — others have this for their portion ; and whether they 
subjugate roving disorganized masses or rule their own group, 
winning a more or less willing allegiance there, the basis of 
their superiority is the same. When then such men value, they 
are likely to do so more or less differently from those beneath 
them. Comfort and personal security are not a first considera- 
tion — nor are they looking to others to be kind and good to them. 
They use "good" in a peculiar sense : it is not a "good to/' they 
feel themselves good; they approve not so much beneficence or 
benevolence, as their own overflowing power and exuberant 
manner of life. The mass, however, look at things from another 
standpoint. They are the weaker, the less self-sufficient, and 
have need of kindness at others' hands. They do the heavy 

e Cf. Werke, XIV, 67, §133; Will to Power, §§274, 400. 

7 Zarathustra, I, xvii. 

8 Pp. 435 ff. 

8 The principal passages are Beyond Good and Evil, § 260, and the 
first treatise of Genealogy of Morals. We have already (p. 124) noticed 
the anticipatory view of Human, All-too-Human, § 45. 

10 See the descriptions in Genealogy etc., 1, § 7. 



VARYING TYPES OF MORALITY 251 

labor, and mutual help means much to them. All live more or 
less in fear in primitive times, but the humbler and weaker 
especially, and to be delivered from it, to have others good to 
them instead of evil, is a supreme desire; the principal func- 
tion of rulers in their eyes is to protect them from evil from 
outside. 

It is contrasted perspectives like these which give birth, in 
Nietzsche's judgment, to the contrasted valuations, "gut" and 
"schlecht" on the one side, "gut" and "~b'6se" on the other. 
The ruling class feel themselves good, and, sensible of the con- 
trast between themselves and those beneath them, they call the 
latter not good, schlecht. Nietzsche remarks on the fact that the 
German word schlecht originally meant little more than 
plain, ordinary ; n it had a shade of contempt — Wundt gives 
"simple," "plain," "poor," "mean" as its equivalents. 12 It 
came to have its present moral signification roughly speaking 
with the Thirty Years' War (so Nietzsche says), and still has 
a flavor of contempt. I know of no precise English equivalent 
for it, but perhaps the nearest is "bad." So the English trans- 
lation of Nietzsche's Werke renders it, and when we speak of 
work as "badly done," of a book as "badly written," and mean 
"in poor, inferior fashion," we approach the particular shade 
of significance it has. But the valuations "gut" and "hose" 
are different. These reflect the sentiments and situation of the 
subject or slave class. Here "good" is equivalent to fear- 
allaying, kindly, benevolent, sympathetic — "hose" signifying 
the opposite. Indeed Nietzsche appears to think that hose is the 
more original conception of the two, the positive conception — 
"good" being an after-formation and counterpart to it. 13 

The master and subject valuations are thus quite different. 
Each class has its good and evil (in the broad sense) correspond- 
ing to the conditions of its life, but the good of the one is not 
the good of the other, and the evil of the one is not the evil of 
the other. f The rulers can only maintain their particular type 
of existence by estimating things as they do — to use Nietzsche's 
metaphor, they protect themselves with their "good" and 

11 Genealogy etc., I, § 4; Werke, XI, 256, § 236. 

12 Ethics, I, 41 (Eng. tr.) ; cf. H. Paul's Deutsches Worterbuch, 
under " schlecht." 

13 Genealogy etc., I, § 10. 



252 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

"schlecht" as with sacred groves; 14 and the mass equally pro- 
tect themselves by judging as they do. The two classes have, 
indeed, a different temper throughout. The valuations of the 
higher class are direct, active ; those of the mass are rather from 
ressentiment or reactive. Also the happiness of the superior 
class is direct — it comes from a sense of the fullness of their 
power, joy in activity is a part of it; but for the lower class 
happiness is in rest from activity, something found in times of 
relaxation or when under some narcotic influence. Again, the 
superior let themselves go more, the lower are more calculating 
(klilger). The higher vent their anger straightway — it does not 
poison them and they easily forget (Mirabeau is a modern in- 
stance) ; they, if anybody, can love their enemies — they indeed 
want an enemy, one in whom there is nothing to despise and 
much to honor, and honoring is a way to loving ; but the lower 
cherish their resentment, keeping it in secret places within 
them, and fear their enemy rather than honor him. 15 g 

It goes without saying that the contrast between the two 
classes and their moralities is within limits. The group as a 
whole must live, and what is helpful and harmful to it as a 
collectivity must have the first place. The sense of separateness 
of the higher class, their contempt for the lower, cannot go too 
far; and the mass, if they require protection and consideration 
and kindness too absolutely, will not give the services and make 
the sacrifices needed in time of war. In general, however, the 
group interests may be furthered rather than hindered by the 
differentiation into classes, with their respective points of view. 
It is a rudimentary kind of organization, and an organized 
mass is always stronger than a structureless one. Moreover, 
Nietzsche need not be supposed to mean that the classes and 
their moralities are marked off absolutely against each other; it 
is enough if, as the classes arise, they tend to take contrasted 
points of view — the moralities are types, schemata, not neces- 
sarily fully accomplished realities. And yet the contrasts are so 
great that not only is the good of the master-class not the good 
of the subject-class, but it may be the evil of the latter — the 
overflowing power of the ruler being just that which makes the 
subject afraid of him. A conqueror, for example, is always 
14 Zarathustra, III, x, § 2. " Genealogy etc., I, § 10. 



VARYING TYPES OF MORALITY 253 

hose in the eyes of those whom he conquers, though it is just in 
conquering that he feels himself good, 16 and whether the ruling 
class are conquerors from outside or native to the group they 
rule, the ruled stand more or less in dread of them. This is 
especially the case, in Nietzsche 's opinion, after a group has 
been delivered from its enemies and lives in entire security ; for 
the abounding energy, the overflowing vitality, the love of en- 
terprise and conquest and domination, which are the character- 
istic marks of the superior class and which had been utilized in 
the public interest in time of danger and war, are now without 
an outlet and all too easily discharge themselves harmfully 
within the group itself. 17 Indeed, members of the ruler class 
may seem hose when they are not ; in mere exuberance of spirits 
and because their heaped-up energy must have vent, they may 
do harm and inflict suffering, without evil intent on their part. 18 h 
And, on the other hand, there is a tendency, Nietzsche thinks, 
for the "good" of the subject-class to become the "schlecht" 
of the ruling class, i.e., to be looked down upon with something 
like contempt. His language is, "The contrast reaches its 
climax, when, in harmony with the logic of slave-morality, 
something like depreciation (ein Hauch von Geringschatzung) — 
it may be slight and kindly — at last attaches itself even to the 
good man of this morality, since the good man, within the slave 
mode of thought, must at all events be the undangerous man: 
he is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a bit stupid, un 
bonhomme. Everywhere, where slave-morality gets the upper 
hand, language shows an inclination to bring the words 'good' 
and ' stupid' near together." 19 

One way of characterizing the two moralities would be to 
say that one is a morality of self-approval, the other a utilitarian 
morality. Considerations of usefulness — usefulness to them — 
determine the judgments of the mass as to good and evil, for 
they are weak and need to have things arranged for their 
benefit. But the powerful class, who put their impress on 
things, who are happy in themselves — what is utility to them? 

18 Cf. Dawn of Day, § 189; Beyond Good and Evil, §260; Genealogy 
etc., I, §11. 

17 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 201; The Wanderer etc., § 31. 

18 Cf. Dawn of Day, § 371. 

19 Beyond Good and Evil, § 260. 



254 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

Nietzsche virtually distinguishes the moralities in this manner 
himself; 20 and yet in a broader sense all morality, whether of 
the group or of any class within it, is utilitarian according to 
his way of thinking— that is, it is good and binding not on its 
own account, but in that it furthers a given type of life and 
corresponds to the conditions of its preservation and develop- 
ment. 21 

in 

Such are tm broad Outlines of his view. I give now the 
particular philological suggestions that seem to have inspired 
it, or at least, as he thought, to confirm it. He is not dogmatic 
in using them, and some of his conjectures he came to see were 
mistaken. 22 It was a method of approaching the subject that 
interested him, more than any particular results. In a note 
appended to the first treatise of Genealogy of Morals, he ex- 
pressed the wish that some philosophical faculty would institute 
a series of prize papers on the history of morality and particu- 
larly in answer to the question, ''What hints does the science of 
language, and especially etymological investigation, furnish for 
the history of the development of moral conceptions " ? * It is 
of interest to note that after almost a quarter of a century one 
German university has fulfilled this wish. 23 I shall mention only 
the more important of Nietzsche 's philological suggestions ; they 
are mainly as to words expressive of the master-class valuations, 
which he thinks were the older of the two. 

The Greek word for good, dya$6?, is, he is aware, of uncer- 
tain derivation, but the words for "superior," "noble" were, 
he thinks, unquestionably class-designations (i.e., ruler-class, 
aristocratic) at the start, and he suspects that ay ado?, was too. 24 
He instances phrases like "we superior, we good, we beautiful, 

20 Ibid., §260; Genealogy etc., I, §2. 

21 See the further statement as to terminology in note u to chap. 
xxix. 

22 For example, his view as to the connection of " gut " (and " Goth ") 
with " gottlich," expressed in Genealogy etc., I, § 5. He abandoned it 
after Brandes had communicated strictures upon it (see Brief e, III, 311-2; 
cf . 279 ) . 

23 So R. M. Meyer, Nietzsche (1913), p. 526 (without mentioning the 
university by name ) . 

24 Genealogy etc., I, §§4, 5; cf. Werke, XI, 256, §236 (as to hoflich, 
gentile, edel, vornehm, noble, genereux, courtoisie, gentleman ) . 



VARYING TYPES OF MORALITY 255 

we happy ones," with which old-time Greek aristocrats some- 
times described themselves 25 — having in mind, perhaps, lan- 
guage used by Theognis, who speaks of the ''nobles" constantly 
as "the good," and of the common mass as the "bad" or 
"base." One thinks too of xaXoxayaQoS, with which the aris- 
tocratic ideal was summed up, though Nietzsche does not refer 
to it. Leopold Schmidt, it may be added, thinks that ay ad 6? 
referred to personal bravery and other characteristics, such as 
may be supposed to have belonged pre-eminently to early aris- 
tocracies : 26 and of one thing we may, I suppose, be sure, namely, 
that it did not stand for the qualities, kindly, benevolent, sym- 
pathetic, with which we pre-eminently identify "good" today. 
Turning to the Latin word, bonus, Nietzsche conjectures that it 
goes back to an older duonus (like helium from duellum), sig- 
nifying a man in dissension, a warrior: accordingly "we see 
what in old Rome a man's 'goodness' amounted to." 27 The 
old-time superior classes also designated themselves hy other 
terms — perhaps oftenest, after their superiority in power, as 
"the mighty," "the lords," "the commanders," or, after the 
most visible sign of their superiority, as "the rich," "the pos- 
sessors" (this the meaning of arya, with equivalents in Eranian 
and Slavic), or, after a typical trait of character, as "the truth- 
ful." The last term was particularly in use among the Greek 
nobility: in contrast with the weaker mass given to lying and 
dissimulation, they called themselves eedXoi — at least Theognis 
liked to describe them in this way; 28 and it is interesting to 
note that in Hindu "good" is equivalent to "true," "bad" to 
"untrue." 29 

Taking up now the words contrasted with ay ado? and bonus, 
Nietzsche points out that in both uano? and 8ei\6s fear or 
cowardice is emphasized. 30 Dewey and Tufts note that "base" 

25 Genealogy etc., I, §10; cf. § 7 as to "good," "superior," "power- 
ful," " beautiful," " happy," " loved of the Gods." 
28 Ethik der alten Griechen, I, 289. 

27 Genealogy etc., I, § 5. The prevailing etymologies of bonus are 
quite different (see Wundt, op. cit., I, 27). 

28 Genealogy etc., I, § 5. Cf., however, Nietzsche's reflections on the 
Greek aristocrats in Dawn of Day, § 199. 

29 So Wundt, op. cit., I, 27, citing Abel Bergaigne, Religion vedique 
d'apres les hymnes du Rig-Veda, I, 179. 

30 Genealogy etc., I, § 5. Cf., as to other terms for the common, 
heavy-laden, unhappy man, § 10. 



256 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

and "mean" were originally simply antitheses to "gentle" and 
"noble," "villain" meaning a feudal tenant, "knave" a 
servant, "rascal" one of the common herd; they even say that 
"bad" probably meant originally weak or womanish 31 — in other 
words, all were practically class terms, applied de haut en has. 
Nietzsche makes his most problematical conjecture as to the 
Latin malus — suggesting that the common man as the dark- 
colored (particularly dark-haired) is thus indicated. He con- 
nects it with the Greek jaihoZ (black) — as does also, I may add, 
Wundt (citing Curtius), though Wundt has rather in mind dirt 
or uncleanness, as viewed by the priestly class. 32 The hypothesis 
is that "dark-haired" points to the pre-Aryan inhabitants of 
Italy, whom the Latin peoples conquered, they being dark as 
the Latin Aryans were blond. Nietzsche finds an analogy in 
the Gaelic, where "fin" (e.g., in Fin-Gal) — the distinctive term 
for the nobility, and coming at last to mean the good, noble, 
pure — designated originally the blond head, in contrast to the 
dark, black-haired aborigines. The Celts also, in common with 
the other Aryan invaders of Europe, were blond — although it 
appears to Nietzsche that, as time has gone on, the aborigines 
have everywhere more or less got the upper hand of their con- 
querors, in both bodily and moral characteristics. 33 As to the 
German " schlecht ," practically all the authorities agree with 
Nietzsche's view already given. 34 His general idea is that the 
ruler classes virtually stamped their view on current speech 35 — 
that is, did so at the start, for other valuations, coming from 
other classes, are the prevailing ones now. 36 

As stated, "good" and "bad" designated classes at first, but 
in time their meaning came to be generalized, so that they stood 
simply for the qualities of the contrasted classes, irrespective 
of who possessed them. j These more general meanings were, 
roughly speaking, fixed for the Greek world in the time of 

81 Op. cit., p. 176. They remark also that " cattivo," the Italian 
word for "bad," meant originally "captive" (cf. the English "caitiff"). 

32 Wundt, op. cit., I, 44; Curtius, Griechische Etymologie (5th ed.), 
p. 370. 

33 Genealogy etc., I, § 5. 

84 Cf., e.g., Wundt, op. cit., I, 41. 

35 Dewey and Tufts admit that "the upper class has been most 
effectual in shaping language and standards of approval" {op. cit., p. 
175). 

36 Nietzsche argues this at length in Genealogy etc., I, §§ 1-3. 



VARYING TYPES OF MORALITY 257 

Socrates when the cleavage between the classes had more or less 
disappeared k — Socrates himself doing much to fix and popu- 
larize them. They were, so to speak, the spiritual legacy of the 
old-time ruling class. So much then for "good and bad 
(schlecht) " the dominant valuations, as Nietzsche thinks, in the 
Greco-Roman world. 

IV 

And now as to the other type of morality, whose antithesis 
is "good and evil (hose)." Save to the extent to which it shades 
off into group-morality in general, it may be doubted whether 
it domesticated itself in the ancient world. It is the morality 
of the mass, and the mass had not sufficient power to impress 
their views upon language — perhaps were not ' ' class-conscious ' ' 
enough (to use a modern phrase), or with enough general intel- 
lectual development to perceive that they had a good and evil 
of their own ; at best there was a tendency, an instinct, a craving 
in that direction. 1 This in general ; but there was an exception. 
In the case of one remarkable people of antiquity the mass or 
slave morality did articulate itself — and that owing to a pe- 
culiar combination of circumstances: I refer to the Jews. The 
early morality of Israel was much like that of other primitive 
vigorous peoples; but after the rise of the prophets,™ and par- 
ticularly after the national downfall, there was a change. It 
was one of the main characteristics of the prophets that they 
took the side of the people, the common man, against the ex- 
cesses of those who ruled. Under their influence the instinctive 
valuations of the weaker and poorer class attained an extraor- 
dinary development, and at last came to constitute the dominant 
morality of the community. Particularly when the community 
came under foreign dominion, when Israel became an op- 
pressed and suffering people, did the point of view of the 
weaker class become that of the nation as a whole. The poor, 
the weak, the suffering, became almost ipso facto the righteous 
and the good ; n kindness, mutual help, mercy, and pity were 
made an absolute ideal — the law of Jahweh himself. We have 
heard much in recent years of the transformation of the ancient 
religion of Israel into an ethical religion — this is its meaning. 
Jahweh is no longer simply an impersonation of the nation's 



258 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

power and might and glory, he is the God of the humble, the 
protector and avenger of the poor and weak — he casts down the 
mighty and the proud. The ideals of the mass and the priestly 
ideal of purity were fused into a combination — Jahweh, or, more 
strictly speaking, Jahweh 's law — the like of which the world 
has never seen. Who is not aware of the difference between the 
literature of Greece (particularly before Plato) and the Psalms 
(most of them), or the prophecies of Isaiah (especially the later 
Isaiah) and Jeremiah? There is not so much a contradiction 
as a different climate or atmosphere — the stress of things, the 
background of ideals, the supreme values are different. The 
Jews become in effect a priestly people, making the mass valua- 
tions absolute and divine. 

And now at length there comes an hour of supreme triumph 
and revenge for them — not indeed for them individually or as 
a corporeal entity, but for the soul of Israel, for their ideal. 
In Christianity, born out of Israel, that ideal virtually over- 
came the old Greco-Roman world — overcame the master-morality 
that lingered on in it. Physically Israel was no match for the 
Roman Empire — those who strove in that direction were not 
representative of her real strength. But her mind — and some- 
times none develope forces of mind like the weak — overcame 
Rome's mind, and perhaps even contributed to Rome's physical 
downfall, by sapping the life of the old ideals — master-class 
ideals — on which the Empire rested. Christianity was in effect 
a message, a gospel to that class in the Empire which had not 
yet come to recognition and power — the poor, the suffering, the 
toiling, the heavy-laden; it met their instinctive cravings, gave 
them a sense of their significance, made them think themselves 
the equals of those who had hitherto looked down upon them, 
yes, their superiors so far as they practised faithfully the new 
morality — superior not only in their own sight, but actually, as 
would be proved when Israel's God should make over the world 
in their favor, giving to them the felicities of Heaven and to 
their enemies the sufferings of Hell. It may seem strange to 
speak of the spirit of triumph and revenge in connection with 
Christianity. But let any one read the language of the best- 
known early Christian apostle, in writing to one of the churches 
he had founded : ' ' You see your calling, brethren, how that not 



VARYING TYPES OF MORALITY 259 

many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many 
noble are called ; but God hath chosen the foolish things of the 
world to confound the wise,- and God hath chosen the weak 
things of the world to confound the things that are mighty; 
and base things of the world and things which are despised, 
yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that 
are. ' ' 37 One who fails to catch the undertone of triumph and 
sublimated revenge in these words has hardly ears to hear. A 
kind of animus against and desire to humiliate the " noble and 
great' ' of the world — a spirit of refined cruelty to them — came 
to be a part of the Christian tradition ; Nietzsche cites a striking 
passage from Tertullian (de spectac, 29fr\). 38 As gentle a soul 
as St. Francis of Assisi could say, ' ' God has chosen me, because 
he could find no lower one, because he would turn to disgrace 
nobility, greatness, power, beauty, and the world's wisdom." 390 



Such is an abstract and meager statement of the historical 
process by which, as Nietzsche views the matter, the morality 
of the slave or subject class, the mass, established itself in the 
world — a poor substitute, I own, for his own vivid and telling 
descriptions. 40 p He does not mean that kindness and mutual 
help and pity were unknown in the ancient world — or were 
unrecognized as a part of the moral code; to a certain extent 
sentiments and actions of this sort are necessary for the main- 
tenance of any society — and he was well aware of it. He simply 
means that ideals of this description never obtained the supreme 
and dominant place which they now have in the world, never 
were made absolutely binding on all men, never were identified 
with morality itself, before prophetic Israel and Christianity 
played their part. It was the triumph of the common man, of 
the old-time slave class. Nietzsche speaks of it picturesquely as 
the "slave-insurrection." No one with the slightest understand- 
ing of him will imagine that he means by this anything spectacu- 

37 1 Corinthians, I, 26-8. See Nietzsche's references to this passage, 
The Antichristian, §§45, 51. 

38 Genealogy etc., I, § 15. 

39 Quoted by Simmel, op. cit., p. 100. 

40 See Beyond Good and Evil, §§195, 52; Genealogy etc., I, §§7-17 
(particularly 7-9 and 14-17); Werke, XIII, 326, §797; XIV, 68-70. 



260 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

lar or sudden. A subtle, slow, secular revolution in the mental 
and moral realm is what he has in mind — a matter, as he says, 
of two thousand years, and only now out of sight and con- 
sciousness, because it has triumphantly accomplished itself. 41 
For us today " moral' ' is almost identical with unegoistic, dis- 
interested ; our standard is the well-being of all or of the greatest 
number — it is only as we are unselfish that we are good, only 
as we serve that we are great. 42 This sweeping change in the 
very meaning of words is the insurrection. The former " slave" 
is now on top, and those once called "superior," "mighty ones," 
"beautiful," "happy," "loved of the Gods" are under: even 
if they emerge, they have bad conscience and feel that they must 
apologize for themselves — they too, forsooth, must serve the 
slave, as the slaves serve one another ! At the very best we men 
of today have divided minds; Nietzsche remarks that there is 
perhaps no more decisive sign of a "higher nature" now than 
to be so divided — a battle-place for antithetical sets of valua- 
tions. 43 The reproach is often made against him that he pro- 
posed to overturn morality ; but this is an overturning that has 
already taken place. The morality by which Greece and Rome 
lived in their great days no longer rules — it has been under- 
mined, sapped by the Prophets and the Church. Speaking more 
simply, the aristocratic valuations, "good" and "bad," have 
been overthrown by the mass valuations, "good" and "evil." 
The overturning ** which Nietzsche proposed was, in fact, as we 
shall see, more of a restoration than a destruction. He par- 
ticularly says that by "beyond good and evil" he does not mean 
"beyond good and bad" ; 45 he has no idea of transcending moral 
distinctions in general, but simply of transcending a particular 
set of distinctions that have won preponderance in the modern, 
or rather Christian, world. 

41 Genealogy etc., I, § 7. 

42 Ibid., I, § 2. 
48 Ibid., I, § 16. 

44 The word which Nietzsche uses, " Umiverthung," is difficult of 
translation. It is not exact to say " overturning," for this suggests 
destruction simply; the idea is really of a turning around or altering of 
values. " Transvaluation " has come into popular use as an equivalent, 
but I confess that I have to turn it into German to know what it means. 

45 Genealogy etc., I, § 17. 



CHAPTER XX 

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). RESPONSIBILITY, 
RIGHTS AND DUTIES, JUSTICE 

I pass now to Nietzsche's views on certain details in morality, 
beginning with responsibility, rights and duties, and justice. 



We saw, in dealing with the preceding period, that Nietzsche 
could make nothing of responsibility in the sense of accounta- 
bility for one's actions — this idea resting on that of free will, 
which to him was illusory. 1 The utility of the idea he did not 
question, but it had no standing in foro scientiae. In another 
sense of the word, however, he held that responsibility could 
really exist, and that training to it had been a high historic 
function of morality itself. One is responsible in this sense who 
will do as he has agreed to do, who responds to the expectations 
he has created, who can be trusted. Nietzsche regards this as 
far from a state of nature for men; it is a cultural result and 
implies a process of social training. "To train up (her an- 
ziichten) an animal who can (darf) promise — is this not just 
the paradoxical task which nature has set in respect to man? 
is it not the real problem of man?" 2 A preliminary require- 
ment is memory. Psychologists and biologists have much to tell 
us of the meaning and physiological basis of memory; but how 
to get it or create it is another problem. Forgetfulness comes 
nearer being the natural state of man, and, what is more, for- 
getfulness has its uses. Nietzsche regards it as not merely a 
vis inertiae (perhaps the common view), but as an active power 
of inhibition, a form of health, by which the past is not forever 
kept in sight, and freedom is gained for fresh experience and 
the work of today. The person in whom this inhibitory ap- 

x See pp. 115 k. 

2 Genealogy etc., II, § 1. This section is based on §§ 1, 2, 3 of 
Genealogy etc., II, except when otherwise stated. 

261 



262 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

paratus is injured and prevented from acting, may be compared 
to a dyspeptic, who is never done with anything. Yet against 
this strong forgetfulness is now to be developed a contrary 
power by the help of which forgetfulness is suspended for cer- 
tain cases — namely, those where promises have been made: not 
then a mere passive inability te-J Arget, a kind of indigestion in 
regard to a pledged word, but a will not to forget, a continuous 
willing of what has been willed, a veritable memory of the will, 
so that between the original "I will/' and the final discharge 
in act proper, there is no break, whatever new things, circum- 
stances, or even volitions may have intervened. This presup- 
poses much. In order so to dispose of the future, one must 
have learned to distinguish between the necessary and the acci- 
dental, to think causally, to see the future as if it were present 
and anticipate it, to fix firmly what is end and what means, to 
reckon and calculate in general. Above all, a man must have 
become calculable himself — that is regular, necessary, and this 
not merely to others, but to himself, so that he can answer for 
himself as a future quantity. How can a memory of this sort 
be given to the human animal — how stamp on this flighty crea- 
ture of the moment, this bodily incarnation of forgetfulness, 
something which will remain ever present with him ? How has 
it been done in the past ? 

The story is not agreeable reading — Nietzsche thinks that 
there is perhaps nothing more fearful and uncanny in the early 
history of mankind than the technique used for creating memory 
(Mnemotechnik) . "We burn in something so that it may stay 
in mind; only what does not cease to give pain stays in the 
mind" — this he calls a leading proposition out of the oldest 
psychology on earth, and alas ! the longest-lived. It might even 
be said that wherever there is still solemnity, earnestness, mys- 
tery, gloomy coloring in the life of men and peoples, there 
lingers something of the after-effect of the frightful conditions 
under which promises, pledges, vows were originally everywhere 
made — the breath of the oldest, deepest, hardest past is upon us 
and rises in us, when we are " earnest. " The most horrible 
sacrifices and forfeits (to which the sacrifices of the first-born 
belong), the most repulsive mutilations (for example, castra- 
tion), the cruellest ritual performances of religious cults — all 



RESPONSIBILITY 263 

had their origin in the instinct to look on pain as the most 
powerful expedient of mnemonics. The poorer the memory was, 
the more fearful the practices; the severity of penal codes in 
particular gives a measure of how difficult is was to get a victory 
over forgetfulness, and to keep present to slaves of passion and 
the moment a few primitive requirements of social life. Nietz- 
sche refers in this connection to the Germans and their penal 
laws: "We Germans certainly do not consider ourselves a par- 
ticularly cruel and hard-hearted people, still less as particularly 
light-headed or living merely for the day ; but let one look into 
our old criminal codes, if one wants to get an inside view of 
the trouble that had to be taken to train up a 'people of 
thinkers.' " He instances stoning (according to legend a mill- 
stone fell on the head of an insolvent debtor), breaking on a 
wheel (the most characteristic invention and specialty of Ger- 
man genius in the realm of punishment), impaling, "quarter- 
ing," seething the criminal in oil or wine (still done in the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), flaying, cutting flesh from 
the breast, also smearing the evil-doer with honey and exposing 
him to flies under a burning sun. It was by the help of processes 
like these, or pictures of them, that men retained in their minds 
five or six "I will nots," in respect to which promise had been 
given in order to live under the benefits of society — and were 
brought at last "to reason"! "Ah, reason, earnestness, rule 
over the passions (Affecte), the whole gloomy thing we call 
reflection, all these privileges and ornaments of man — how 
deeply have they made themselves paid for, how much blood 
and horror are at the basis of all 'good things' "! 

Measures of this character belong to the rudimentary, 
formative stages of society everywhere. It is by the steady 
pressure of social codes that man gets a "memory of the will," 
and is turned into an anywise regular, reckonable being. And 
the end justifies the means here, whatever of hardness, tyranny, 
stupidity, or idiocy attached to them. The Kamschatkans re- 
quired that snow should never be scraped off with a knife, that 
a coal should never be pierced with a knife, that iron should 
never be put into the fire — death being the penalty for non- 
compliance. The rules seem absurd, but they were rules, and 
kept the perpetual nearness of social authority, the uninter- 



264 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

rupted compulsion to respect it, in the consciousness; Nietz- 
sche thinks that this was really their point rather than any- 
utilitarian advantage, and he cites them to illustrate the view 
already mentioned that any rule is better than no rule, when 
the interests of civilization are at stake. 3 

Let us attend for a moment to the result itself. It is a 
notable one. Men not only know now what to expect of one 
another and so far cease to be hose in one another's eyes, al- 
though the world outside the group still has this character, 4 
but they have a new feeling about themselves. They can 
promise, they may because they can — in other words, they have 
a sense of power. Brandes remarks that for Nietzsche a defini- 
tion of man would be an animal able to make and keep vows 
(Gelubde). 5 The animal world in general yields no such phe- 
nomenon — action is apparently from the feeling of the moment, 
no engagements being made for the future. I say "men," 
"man" — but it would be better to say "some men," for those 
who vow and keep their vows are marked off from the rest, 
and naturally acquire a sense of their distinction. They are 
the ripe fruit of the social tree ; the ages of tyrannous discipline 
receive at last a justification in them, and, as masters of them- 
selves, masters of contrary inclinations within and of untoward 
circumstances without, how can they fail to be conscious of 
their superiority, and to inspire confidence, fear, reverence in 
others! "The 'free' man, the possessor of a long unbreakable 
will, has in this possession also his measure of worth: looking 
at others from his own standpoint, he honors or he despises ; and 
just as necessarily as he honors those like him, men strong and 
dependable (who dare promise) ... he has his kick ready for 
puny windbags who promise without having the right to, and 
his rod for the liar who breaks his word the moment it is in 
his mouth." It is an extraordinary privilege (privilegium, 
special and exclusive advantage or right), that of responsibility, 
and the proud knowledge of it, the consciousness of this rare 
freedom, this power over himself and over fate, sinks to the 
innermost depths of his being and becomes an instinct, a 

8 Dawn of Day, § 16. 
* Cf. Werke, XI, 211, § 132. 

B " Aristokratischer Radikalmus," Deutsche Rundschau, April, 1890, 
p. 74. Cf. Nietzsche's own language, Werke, XII, 411. 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 265 

dominating instinct — he calls it his conscience [part of it]. 6 It 
is from those thus responsible that the type of "sovereign indi- 
vidual" or "person" 7 (of whom we have heard something and 
shall hear more) arises, for he who can answer for himself 
becomes naturally a law unto himself. 

ii 

In connection with responsibility Nietzsche treats of rights 
and duties. Buying and selling he regards as among the oldest 
phenomena of human society. Yet when one buys and does not 
at once pay, but makes a promise to pay, responsibility comes 
into play. The debtor naturally wishes to inspire his creditor 
with confidence, and may also wish to impress on his own con- 
science the seriousness and sacredness of his engagement; and 
so he agrees that in case he does not pay, the creditor may take 
over something that still belongs to him, parts of his body, for 
instance, or his wife, or his liberty, or even his life — or, where 
certain religious conceptions prevail (as in ancient Egypt), 
his soul's salvation or his rest in the grave. 8 These things will 
make up to the creditor for his loss, if he sustains it — be an 
equivalent. Bartering, estimating values, fixing prices, devis- 
ing equivalents — this preoccupied the earliest thinking of man 
to such an extent that it was in a sense thinking itself: here 
the oldest kind of acuteness was developed, here the first forms 
of human pride and sense of superiority over other animals 
arose — perhaps the word Mensch (manas) means at bottom one 
who measures. 9 Yet when the measuring has been made and 
the equivalent fixed upon, the debtor and creditor stand in a 
peculiar relation: the former owes, has a duty, the latter has 
a claim, a right. 10 Duties and rights were often grim things 
in early times — particularly rights. There seems to have been 
a special desire on the part of the creditor to exact equivalents 

• Nietzsche was aware ( Genealogy etc., II, § 3 ) that the concept 
conscience " has a long history and has passed through many forms," this 
being simply one of them. 

7 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 813, 1009. 

8 Genealogy etc., II, § 5. 

8 Ibid., II, §8; cf. The Wanderer etc., §22; Zarathustra, I, xv. 

10 Rights may of course be guaranteed by others than the parties 
immediately concerned (cf. Dawn of Day, § 112), but this does not appear 
to be Nietzsche's view of their origin. 



266 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

involving pain or shame to the debtor. In no other way is it 
possible to account for the fact that instead of being satisfied 
with a natural equivalent for his loss, such as land, money, 
property of any kind, the creditor so often demanded the right 
to mistreat a debtor's body, to take away his wife, or to make 
him a slave. It was really a right to cruelty : only to one with 
cruel instincts does suffering yield a pleasure equal or superior 
to that of a material compensation — to such an one, indeed, 
suffering is the equivalent par excellence. The right to cruelty 
was graded very fine at times and was very exacting — one could, 
for example, cut from the debtor's body just so and so much 
(according to the amount of the debt), particular parts and 
members having their special valuation; and Nietzsche deems 
it progress and a proof of the freer, greater, more Roman spirit, 
when the Twelve Tables made it a matter of indifference whether 
more or whether less was cut off in a special case — "si plus 
minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto." Whether the creditor 
inflicted the suffering in person or a functionary of the group 
did so for him, made no essential difference — at least he could 
witness the suffering and be satisfied. 11 This idea that wrong 
may be compensated for by suffering has an important sub- 
sequent history, as we shall see in the next chapter. 

Rights and duties were originally, as Nietzsche thinks, of 
this very matter-of-fact kind, and the grave, almost somber 
meaning which the words still have in our minds, take us back 
to the times when it was a serious thing to promise, when pain 
was an educator to responsibility, and suffering the common 
equivalent for wrong. And when rights and duties acquire a 
wider range and have a more spiritual character, their ground- 
meaning and perspective does not changed In time the group 
comes to be viewed as a creditor, and its members as debtors 
to it. The community gives advantages ("and what advan- 
tages! we underestimate them today," says Nietzsche), and the 
individual enjoys them— he lives protected, cared for, in peace 
and confidence, with no concern about injuries and hostilities 
to which one outside is exposed; and in return he obligates 
himself to the community not to commit injuries and hostilities 
against his fellow-members. If, however, he does commit them, 
11 Genealogy etc., II, §5. 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 267 

what happens? The community, the deceived creditor, will 
make itself paid somehow — of that we may be sure. The im- 
mediate injury inflicted is the least thing: aside from this he 
has broken his word, his word and covenant with the whole, 
and all the goods and comforts of community life in which 
he has hitherto shared are now in question. The breaker 
(Brecher, Verorecher) is a debtor who not only does not repay 
the advantages given him, but lays violent hands on his creditor ; 
therefore from now on, as is reasonable, he not only loses all 
these advantages, but he is made to realize what their value is. 
The wrath of the injured creditor gives him back to the wild 
outlaw state from which he had been before protected ; it thrusts 
him forth — and every kind of hostility may now be shown him. 
"Punishment" is at this stage of civilization a copy (Mimus) 
of the normal relation to a hated, disarmed, subjugated enemy. 12 

The mores of a community may soften as time goes on and 
as the community becomes stronger, but the general, under- 
lying idea and basis of rights and duties remains the same. 
Eights arise when men (individually or as a community) give 
something, and for this expect a return; duties arise when men 
receive something, and owe in return. There are then no 
rights or duties in the abstract, none existing per se — all are 
conditioned on facts of social relationship, on exchanges and 
contracts (explicit or implied). 13 It is accordingly a misuse 
of words to speak of "rights," whether of defense or of ag- 
gression, as between independent social groups, or for that 
matter between individuals who are not socially related, for 
self-defense or aggression under such circumstances is not in 
accordance with a contract, but is the simple outcome of natural 
egoism, the fatality of life itself. 14 With such a view Nietzsche 
can even say, "We have no right either to existence, or to labor, 
or even to ' happiness': there is no difference in this respect 
between the individual man and the lowest worm." 15 

But while rights and duties rest thus immediately on con- 

12 Ibid., II, §9; cf. The Wanderer etc., §22. 

13 A right "arises," "happens/' much as "truth" does according to 
the Pragmatist view — justice also (cf. Werke, XI, 143). "There is 
neither a right by nature, nor a wrong by nature" {The Wanderer etc.,, 
§31). 

14 Will to Power, § 728. 
16 Ibid., §759. 



268 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

tract, their more ultimate basis is certain relations of power. 
The creditor has a surplus, can part with something — he has 
more power ; but the debtor also has a certain amount of power 
— he can make a return, apart from which he is no better than 
a beggar, something which makes Nietzsche say once in a 
general way that it is our pride that commands the doing of 
our duty. 16 In other words, powerless inactive entities with 
nothing to confer acquire no rights, and incapacitated people 
cannot rise to the dignity of duties. Eights and duties in con- 
crete cases are a fine equation of powers — as power-quantities 
change, they do too. If our power materially diminishes, the 
feeling of those who have hitherto guaranteed our right changes, 
also ; they see whether they can bring us again to full possession 
of our power — if it is impossible, they deny henceforth our 
" rights.' ' Just so, when our power increases considerably, the 
feeling of those, who have hitherto recognized it and whose 
recognition we now no longer need, changes — they may try to 
hold us down to our former measure, they may be ready to, 
interfere and appeal to their "duty" in this connection — but 
it is only useless talk. The history of peoples shows this waxing 
and waning of rights on a large scale. 17 Indeed, Nietzsche goes 
so far in this direction that he may seem to abandon his view 
of the contractual origin of rights altogether. For instance, 
Zarathustra says to his disciples, "a right which thou canst 
seize, thou shalt not allow to be given thee." 18 The idea of 
forcible conquest is carried into the innermost regions of one's 
personality. Whoever, we hear, has finally conquered himself 
[not then simply contracted with himself] regards it as his 
right to punish himself, to pardon himself, to pity himself — it 
is a right he does not need to concede to any one else, though 
he may of his free will give it to another (for instance, a 
friend), knowing that only "those can give rights who are in 
possession of power." 19 Of similar tenor is the statement, "we 
do not believe in a right that does not rest on the power to 
put itself through: we feel all rights to be conquests"; 20 also 

18 Dawn of Day, § 112. 

17 Ibid., § 112; cf. The Wanderer etc., §26. 

18 Zarathustra, III, xii, § 4. 

19 Dawn of Day, § 437. 

20 Will to Power, § 120. 



JUSTICE 269 

the remark that in all political questions, in the relation of 
parties as well, even of commercial or labor or employer parties, 
the questions are those of power — what one can and then what 
one should do ; 21 and the hint to the socialists, earlier referred 
to, that if they would have rights, they must first get power. 22 
The reconciling thought may be that relations of power, which 
are the ultimate foundation of rights and duties ordinarily 
arising through the media of contract, sometimes give rise to 
rights and duties directly, i.e., claims and corresponding obliga- 
tions which do not rest on voluntary consent at all, but none 
the less come to be recognized as claims and obligations, and 
are practically so treated. b The view differs from the prevailing 
one and easily lends itself to abuse, and yet that Nietzsche does 
not mean to sanction any kind of self-assertion, is shown by 
his saying that "the worth of a man should prove what rights 
he may assume/ ' and, still more strongly, that "the rights 
which a man assumes are in relation to the duties he sets him- 
self, the tasks to which he feels he is grown." 23 It is because 
we can effectually promise much, he says again, that we are 
given rights; 24 and he holds that those who cannot promise 
(i.e., have not the right to, being slaves to appetite and the 
moment), should not have rights — an instance being the man 
with only cattle-like desires in his body, who "should not have 
the right to marry." 25 

m 

Our English word ' ' justice ' ' has jural connotations, so much 
so that Dewey and Tufts are led to say that "it is in the school 
of government and courts that man has learned to talk and 
think of right and law, of responsibility and justice." 26 The 
German word, however, is "Gerechtigkeit," and Nietzsche 
thinks that the idea and accompanying sentiment are older than 
anything like organized civil society. 27 His account of the 
matter is somewhat as follows : 

21 Ibid., § 124. 

22 Human, etc., §446. 

28 Werke, XIV, 119; Will to Power, §872. 

24 Werke, XIII, 193, § 425. 

25 Ibid., XIV, 62, §119. 
28 Op. cit., p. 182. 

37 Cf. Genealogy etc., II, §8. 



270 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

That primitive form of social relation which we have already 
considered — bargaining or contracting — has for its presupposi- 
tion a certain equality between the parties concerned. If there 
is decided difference in strength, one side is apt simply to take 
from the other. But where there is approximate equality, and 
struggle would only lead to reciprocal harm, a disposition nat- 
urally arises to come to an understanding, to treat or negotiate, 
the outcome being an exchange, in which each gets what under 
the circumstances he values most (a suum cuique in the material 
sense). 28 This is the earliest form of justice, which is at bottom 
the good will to come to an agreement, to reach a mutually 
satisfactory settlement, something like what the Germans call, 
particularly in its finer expressions, "Billigkeit," the spirit of 
reasonableness and fairness. 29 An exchange is just and honora- 
ble, when each party asks what he thinks his article is worth, 
taking into account the difficulty of procuring it, its rarity, the 
time spent in getting it, etc., along with the fancy value ; if he 
fixes his price with an eye on the needs of the other, he is a 
refined robber and extortioner. 30 That is, if there is to be 
exchange, not robbery, the spirit of exchange must be there — 
and it is with this in mind that Nietzsche makes the remark, 
already quoted, regarding the circumstances of today, that jus- 
tice must become greater in all and the violent instinct weaker. 31 
Justice may even extend to the relations of the stronger to the 
weaker to a certain extent. Suppose, for example, that a be- 
leaguered town finds itself forced to surrender. It is plainly 
the weaker party, but for all that it has something on its side, 
something that it would be of use for the conqueror to obtain. 
The inhabitants might burn the town and make way with them- 
selves — then the conqueror would have little for his pains. 
There is then a certain advantage for both sides in not going 
to extremes — and on this basis of mutual advantage they may 
treat — each getting what under the actual circumstances he 
values most. In the same way there may be rights between 
masters and slaves — that is, to the extent the possession of the 

28 Human, etc., §92 (cf. the reference to " Jedem das Seine," as the 
principle of Gerechtigkeit, in §105), The Wanderer etc., §§22, 26. 

29 Cf. Genealogy etc., II, § 8. 

80 The Wanderer etc., § 25. 

81 Human, etc., § 452. 



JUSTICE 271 

slave is useful and important to his master. Justice goes orig- 
inally as far, as one side seems valuable, essential to the other. 
The weaker accordingly acquires rights, though they are more 
limited ones. Hence the well-known unusquisque tantum juris 
habet, quantum potentia valet (or more exactly, Nietzsche says, 
quantum potentia valere creditur) , 32 The underlying motive 
of justice, Nietzsche points out, is individual advantage — in 
just exchange each one profits; although in time the original 
motive may be forgotten, and just actions may seem disinter- 
ested or unegoistic. 33 

This of the beginnings of justice. Needless to say, it takes 
on finer forms as social life advances. It gives rise to settled 
mores; it comes under the protection of government and courts, 
though itself subtler than anything which government and 
courts can command; it passes into reasonableness, fairness 
(Billigkeit) in general. 34 Justice is good will and intelligence 
combined — there cannot be justice without both. Plato held 
that justice could not be separated from wisdom, the true 
measure of all the relations of life, 35 but Nietzsche 's view is that 
justice is measuring — the intellectual, objective attitude is part 
of its essence. In accordance with this view, he speaks of 
the high, clear, deep- as well as mild-glancing objectivity of 
the just man, when he is not only injured, but insulted, mocked, 
as a piece of perfection, a specimen of the highest mastery on 
earth. 36 

And hereby is justice differentiated from revenge. Justice 
has sometimes been derived from revenge, being supposed to be 
a sublimated form of it — it was, I think, the view in substance 
of John Stuart Mill, and it was held by a German contemporary 
of Nietzsche's, to whom he pays some attention, Eugen 
Diihring. 37 And if revenge were simply return of some kind, 
Nietzsche would have no occasion to dissent; he sometimes 
speaks himself of gratitude as the good revenge, of mag- 

32 Ibid., § 93. In relation to the weaker among themselves, who 
might not come to agreements voluntarily, justice consists in forcing 
them to an agreement (Genealogy etc., II, §8; cf. § 11). 

33 Human, etc., § 92. 

»« Cf. The Wanderer etc., § 32. 
85 So Dewey and Tufts, op. cit., p. 116. 
88 Genealogy etc., II, §11. 

87 Nietzsche mentions particularly Diihring's Werth des Lehens, and 
Cursus der Philosophic (Genealogy etc., II, § 11). 



272 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

nanimity as a sublimated revenge. 38 But ordinarily — and prac- 
tically always in discussing the relation of revenge to justice 
— he means by revenge what most of us mean, namely, an 
instinctive tendency, half of the blood and liable to all manner 
of excess, to strike back when we are injured or affronted. He 
construes it as one of the expressions of the instinct for power, 
which, having been temporarily thwarted, seeks to assert itself 
and feel itself again. 39 Now justice, too, calls for a return for 
injuries; for, to revert to its earliest and simplest form, when 
a debtor does not pay his debt, the creditor may exact a sub- 
stitute for it ; the substitute or equivalent has been agreed upon 
beforehand, and the creditor has a strict right to it — the debtor's 
property or wife or person may become forfeit. And when 
injuries become offenses against the community, compensation 
of some sort comes to be the right of every injured person — 
that is, under justice also, a second injury follows the first. 
Revenge and justice may thus seem to come to much the same 
thing. And yet they are distinct from one another. For under 
justice, the compensating injury which the injured person in- 
flicts (or has inflicted for him) is in accordance with an under- 
standing in advance, either directly between the parties, or as 
a matter of general custom and law ; measuring eyes have been 
at work fixing it, there is definition and limitation — there can 
be then no varying or excess. In other words, justice is an 
intellectual matter, and hence directly antithetical to the blind 
rage with which rage does its work. Revenge is for injury 
simply and is dictated by the sense of injury; just requital is 
for a wrong (violation of contract or agreement) and is deter- 
mined by an antecedent idea of what is fair and reasonable. 
Revenge is personal, justice borders on impersonality. In the 
one, the blood rushes to our eyes so that we do not see, justice 
is seeing (or remembering what we saw). So different are they 
in origin and principle, that revenge may overthrow justice, 
and justice may set limits to revenge. 40 It becomes a leading 
function of the state (when such a thing arises) to put an end 
to the blind raging of revenge, and either to rescue the victims 
or else to proceed against them itself for the injuries they have 

38 Will to Power, §775; Werke, XIII, 190, §420. 

39 Cf. Werke, XIII, 188-92 (§§418, 419, 424). 
*°Ibid., XIII, 193, §429. 



JUSTICE 273 

committed, persuading or compelling the injured party to ac- 
cept compensations, equivalents, in lieu of revenge. 41 Here lies 
the reason why those in the habit of practising revenge — those 
who keep up "blood-feuds/' for instance — are reluctant to 
come under the control of the state, and have to have justice 
forced upon them. 42 The state makes private injuries offenses 
against it, and the treatment of them is so far taken out of the 
jurisdiction of personal feeling ; it virtually adopts what Nietz- 
sche calls the oldest, simplest canon of justice, "everything has 
its price, all can be paid for," and trains its subjects in this 
objective, impersonal way of looking at things — even influenc- 
ing, though perhaps least and last of all, the injured person 
himself. 43 As I might put it briefly, under the state justice 
becomes law (which is far from saying, I need not add, that 
law is ipso facto justice). 

The state, viewing injuries as offenses against itself, punishes 
them. But Nietzsche notes that as political communities become 
stronger, they take offenses less seriously, and mitigate their 
penal codes. A private creditor naturally becomes more 
humane, as his wealth increases — it may even be a measure of 
his wealth how much he can lose without appreciably suffering. 
And a consciousness of power on the part of a political society 
is not unthinkable, in which it might indulge itself in a luxury 
than which there could be no greater — that of letting offenders 
go unpunished. "With easy sense of its superiority it might say, 
"What are these parasites to me? — let them live and thrive. 
I can stand it." And so the justice that began with the dictum, 
"Everything is payable, everything must be paid for," would 
end by looking through its fingers at those who are insolvent 
and letting them go free — end as all good things on earth do, 
by abrogating itself (sich selbst aufheoend) . There is a beau- 
tiful name for this self -abrogation of justice — grace. It is a 
prerogative of what is mightiest — its beyond law (sein Jenseits 
des Rechts) .** 

41 Genealogy etc., II, §11. 

"Ibid., II, § 11; cf. also Werke, XIII, 194, §430, where the point of 
view of those forced is given. 

48 Genealogy etc., II, § 11. I need not say that so far as men take 
the law into their own hands, as in parts of our own country, there is 
reversion to primitive pre-political conditions. 

44 Ibid... II. 10. 



CHAPTER XXI 

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). BAD CONSCIENCE, A 
MORAL ORDER, OUGHT, EQUALITY 



I confess that in taking up Nietzsche's analysis of "bad con- 
science, ' ' I find it difficult to trace a clear and consistent course 
of thought. The main treatment of the subject is in the second 
treatise of Genealogy of Morals. 

First, it may be noted that elsewhere, and incidentally here, 
he often uses the phrase in a way that causes no perplexity. It 
simply designates the feeling which one has in departing from 
a standard which one acknowledges. The first standards of 
men were, as already explained, social; to disobey the group's 
mores in any particular was attended with an uneasy conscious- 
ness. Even to have different ideas from those commonly recog- 
nized did not seem quite right, and science has often come into 
the world stealthily, feeling like a transgressor, or at least like 
a smuggler. 1 The phenomenon continues in its essential fea- 
tures down to the present day. To a troubled young friend 
Nietzsche wrote : ' ' It is curious to observe : he who early departs 
from traditional paths to enter on one that seems right to him- 
self, has always half or altogether the feeling of a man who has 
been exiled and condemned by others and has fled away: this 
kind of bad conscience is the suffering of the independently 
good." 2 He thinks it impossible to estimate what just the 
rarer, selecter, more original minds in the past have suffered 
from the fact that they were looked upon as hose and dan- 
gerous — yes, appeared so to themselves. 3 But there may be 
individual as well as social standards, and one may have "bad 
conscience" when one forgets these too. "Why do we have 

1 Mixed Opinions etc., § 90. 

2 Werke ( pocket ed. ) , V, vii ; cf . Joyful Science, § 296. 
8 Dawn of Day, § 9. ' 

274 



BAD CONSCIENCE 275 

pricks of conscience (Gewissenshisse) after ordinary social com- 
panies? Because we have taken serious things lightly, because 
in discussing persons we have not spoken with complete loyalty, 
or because we have been silent when we should have spoken, 
because we have not on occasion sprung up and taken ourselves 
off — in short, because we conducted ourselves in society as if 
we belonged to it." 4 A scientific man may have bad conscience, 
if he allows himself views unsupported by scientific evidence. 5 
One who has determined to become and achieve something in 
his own person may have bad conscience, if he allows himself to 
be allured into ordinary benevolent work — it is something which 
may accompany altruistic acts as well as egoistic ones. 6 Emer- 
son seems to have experienced it when he succumbed to certain 
philanthropic appeals, calling it a "wicked dollar" that he on 
occasion gave for "your miscellaneous popular charities, the 
education at college of fools, the building of meeting-houses to 
the vain end to which many now stand, alms to sots, and the 
thousandfold Relief Societies." 7 In one of Stendhal's novels 
a Jew has a bad conscience when he falls in love and takes 
money out of his business for a bracelet; and so it was with 
Napoleon, remarks Nietzsche, after he had performed a gen- 
erous act, and may be with a diplomat who for once is honora 
ble. 8 Sometimes the feeling may be indicated in indirect ways, 
as when a man, conscious of the callings of a higher self, but 
giving himself up to society or official work or his family, talks 
much of fulfilling his "duty" — he seeks thereby to excuse him- 
self to himself, to quiet himself. 9 Nietzsche himself wished to 
give a bad conscience to other-worldly aspirations, to the anti- 
natural ideals of Christianity and Schopenhauer, i.e., he wished 
to set up a standard from which these would be felt as a con- 
scious defection. 10 There is no special difficulty in understanding 
bad conscience in cases like these. 



* Human, etc., § 351. 

B Cf. the suggestions of Will to Poicer, § 328. 

a Werke, XII, 123-4, § 243. 

7 Essay on " Self-Reliance." 

8 Werke, XI, 266, § 260. 

9 Ibid., XI, 216, § 145. "All that he now does, is brave and proper 
(ordentlich) — and yet he has with it a bad conscience. For the extraordi- 
nary (Ausserordentliche) is his task" (Joyful Science, §186). 

10 Genealogy etc., II, § 24. 



276 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

But in making a problem of "bad conscience" Nietzsche has 
in mind something different — at least graver. If I should say 
" guilt " or "sense of guilt/' I should more nearly suggest it — 
though guilt, too, may have different shades of intensity or 
blackness. The guilt he has in mind is that implied when man 
is spoken of as a guilty being or as having a guilty nature. It 
is the religious, or more specifically still, the Christian con- 
ception of guilt, the conception essentially shared by Schopen- 
hauer, that concerns him. With it a man feels wrong in his 
essential make-up, particularly in the animal ground-work of his 
being. He looks on his natural impulses with an evil eye, finds 
something praiseworthy in denying them, chastising them, 
mortifying them. 11 Sometimes one goes so far in painful self- 
analysis that one draws up a list of the things that make one 
ashamed of oneself — as Pope Innocent III did, who enumerated 
"impure procreation, nauseous nourishment in the womb, base- 
ness of the material out of which man grows, abominable 
stenches, secretion of spittle, urine, and excrement. ' ' 12 How 
could an attitude like this — a bad conscience about man as man — 
have come about? What were its probable beginnings? 

Nietzsche starts out by saying that guilt originally was a 
form of debt — or rather a development of it under certain 
conditions. The German word Schuld, I may note, means both 
debt and guilt. A debt arises when one does not pay for 
something one has received at once, but if one does not pay 
eventually, one owes something more, namely, the substitute, 
equivalent, or pledge for the debt, which at the outset was 
agreed upon. The latter is guilt in the full, or at least dis- 
tinctive, sense of the term ; the act is a wrong or trespass proper 
and one can only expect the infliction of the penalty. It is 
interesting to note that in our English version of the Lord's 
Prayer, "debts" and "sins" (or "trespasses") are used inter- 
changeably, 13 — a sin or trespass is simply an increased or 

11 Cf. Genealogy etc., II, §§ 16, 18, 24. Schopenhauer's view is given 
in his Werke (Grisebaeh ed.), II, 596, 669 f., 681 ff., 710 f.; IV, 78; V, 
298 f., 317, 329 ff. See Volkelt's chap., " Das Dasein als Schuld," in his 
Schopenhauer (particularly pp. 280-2). 

12 Genealogy etc., II, § 7. 

18 Matthew vi, 12; Luke xi, 4. The Greek words are respectively 
bfcityfiara and d/iapTtao; the word for debtors is virtually the same 
in both places. 



BAD CONSCIENCE 277 

heightened debt. Following this cue and remembering that, 
as already explained, creditor and debtor relations come to apply 
to the community and its individual members, it is easy to see 
how immorality in general, i.e., non-conformity to the com- 
munity's mores, may be felt as guilt — i.e., how "bad con- 
science, " in the customary moral sense of the phrase, may 
arise. In immorality of any kind there would come to be a 
certain "fearful looking for of judgment," and, the tendency 
to immorality being observed to be deep, it might easily be 
concluded that it had its roots in a guilty nature. This is a 
line of thought, however, which Nietzsche, oddly enough, does 
not follow up. He starts on it, 14 and then stops or switches 
off — and even proceeds to argue at length that punishment does 
not give the feeling of guilt, and rather works to harden, at best 
stimulating prudence and taming the transgressor (not making 
him better). 154 But has any one ever argued that punishment 
produced the sense of guilt? — the latter being obviously the 
direct result of violating an admitted standard. Surely, to call 
in something extraordinary and catastrophic to explain "bad 
conscience/' because punishment does not account for it, seems 
strange and unnecessary. Yet this is what Nietzsche does. 
For directly after arguing the inefficacy of punishment, he 
broaches his own special view. This is that bad conscience had 
its origin in that most thoroughgoing of all the changes which 
man has experienced in the course of his history, the change 
consequent on coming definitively under the jurisdiction 
(Bann) of society and of peace. Up to this time — I need not 
say that Nietzsche is referring to a prehistoric period — he had 
been little more than a wild, roving animal, free to follow all 
his natural instincts, including those to pursue, surprise, injure, 
and kill. Suddenly, however, he found himself subjected to a 
social strait- jacket, and his old instincts were deprived of an 
outlet. With then no outer vent, but still fresh and strong, 
these instincts turned on their possessor — man became hostile, 
cruel to himself. "Enmity, cruelty, pleasure in pursuit, in 

14 See Genealogy etc., II, § 4 (p. 350 — the paging is the same in both 
pocket and octavo editions of the German original of this book) ; also, 
§ 8 (p. 360), and § 14 (p. 375) ; the analogy of the community and its 
members to the creditor and debtor is worked out in § 9. 

16 Ibid., II, §§ 15, 16. 



278 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

surprise, in change, in destruction — all this turning itself 
against the possessor of such instincts, this is the origin of 'bad 
conscience.' The man who, in lack of outer enemies and opposi- 
tions, confined under a close, oppressive, and unvarying regime 
of mores, went at himself impatiently, rending, pursuing, biting, 
startling, mistreating himself, this animal, put into a cage to be 
tamed and bruising himself against its bars, this creature, who, 
deprived of his wilderness and consumed with homesickness for 
it, has to make out of himself a field of adventure, a place of 
torture, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness — this fool, this 
longing and despairing captive became the inventor of 'bad 
conscience.' " The change in situation was so great that Nietz- 
sche compares it to what water-animals must have experienced 
when they were first obliged to live on land, and, instead of 
being upborne, had to go on foot and ''carry themselves" — a 
horrible heaviness seized upon them. In default of guidance 
from their old impulses, men had to fall back on thinking, rea- 
soning, calculating, combining causes and effects, in general on 
their "consciousness" — the organ in them that had been 
poorest developed and was most liable to err. Never on earth 
was there such feeling of misery, such leaden discomfort as 
then; and yet the old instincts were still there and unsatisfied, 
and blindly produced the result just mentioned. 16 

If it be asked how man could be subjugated, what or who 
there was to subject him, the answer is "other men." Some 
superior group or race, falling on wandering, formless popula- 
tions, subjugated them and clapped their iron rule upon them. 
The feeling of misery, the unsatisfied instincts preying on their 
possessor, which make the essence of "bad conscience," do not 
appear in the conquering, ruling class, but in the conquered. 
"Bad conscience" is not a universal phenomenon, and the con- 
querors, as Nietzsche conceives them in the present instance, 
are quite without it in what they do. 17 

Nietzsche notes that all depends, in his theory, on the 
suddennesss of the supposed change to which the wild 
populations were subjected; if there had been a gradual, 

"Ibid., II, §16. 

11 Ibid., II, § 17; cf. I, § 11, and a remark as to the aggressive man 
in general, II, § 11 (p. 366). 



BAD CONSCIENCE 279 

voluntary passing from a wild to a civilized (or semi- 
civilized) state, an organic growing into new conditions, 
the old instincts would have fallen little by little into disuse 
and lost the vigor and edge needed to produce the characteristic 
features of the new phenomenon. The roving populations were 
violently subjected — there was no give and take, no contract: 
the earliest "state," Nietzsche remarks (and here he expresses 
a not uncommon opinion), was a fearful tyranny — it was only 
in this way that the raw formless material could be kneaded, 
made pliant, and given a shape. 18 He does not mean (I take it) 
that this was done for all the world at once, but only that the 
process of subjugation and social formation was of this char- 
acter as it occurred: always was there for those subjected a 
violent break with their animal past, the old instincts then sur- 
viving in latent form and forced to act in the subterranean way 
described. Neither does he mean that the full result — bad con- 
science as we find it, for instance, in Buddhism, Christianity, 
and Schopenhauer — was reached at once ; it suffices to his theory 
if the general characteristic features of the new phenome- 
non appeared — if men savagely turned on themselves, and 
preyed on themselves, however confused their feelings might 
be. 19 

The theory probably strikes the reader (as it has me) as 
far-fetched and artificial, and I should add that Nietzsche 
simply speaks of it as "my hypothesis" and calls the exposition 
of it which we have — as it turns out, the only one — a "first 
preliminary expression." And yet it covers three points in the 
phenomenon in a rather striking manner; first, the sharpness 
of "bad conscience," its stinginess and fierceness, these being 
traced to primitive instincts of cruelty — simple departure from 
an admitted standard might not yield anything so extreme; 
second, the sense of a guilty nature (not merely of wrong acts), 
man's animal make-up being particularly in mind — this coming 
from a forced and violent break with an animal past ; third, the 
lack of reason and intelligence in the phenomenon (as Nietzsche 
views the matter, for he regards it as an Erkrankung) , this be- 

13 Ibid., II, §17. 

10 Nietzsche once speaks of what has been described as the crude 
beginnings (Rohzustand) of the feeling of guilt {ibid., Ill, §20). 



280 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

cause a hitherto unused instrument, the conscious reasoning 
mind, was now for the first time acting. 

Positive proofs of the hypothesis are, of course, impossible — 
Nietzsche does not offer any. I suspect that the idea of it came 
to him from something he observed — or thought he observed — 
in quarters nearer home. We find him describing, for instance, 
the probable spiritual fortunes of a German noble, when 
brought under the influence of the Church in the early Middle 
Ages and shut up -in a monastery. It is in the course of a 
discussion of two historic methods of "bettering" man, one of 
taming the animal man, the other of rearing a certain type. 
These are zoological terms, and the former process is like what 
goes on in menageries with wild beasts — they are weakened, 
their power to harm is diminished, they are made sickly 
through fear, pain, wounds, and hunger. It seemed to him that 
something of this sort was what a German "blond beast" under- 
went, when he was tamed by the Church, above all when lured 
into a monastery. The Church was a kind of menagerie, and 
the most beautiful examples of the "" blond beast" were every- 
where hunted down in its interest. And how did one of these 
"bettered" nobles look within the monastery walls? Nietzsche 
answers, "like a caricature of man, like an abortion; he had 
become a 'sinner/ he was fast in a cage, he had been shut in 
between horrible conceptions. . . . There he lay, sick, wretched, 
malevolent against himself: full of hatred against the impulses 
of life, full of suspicion against everything that was still strong 
and happy." 20 Plainly it is a phenomenon much like that to 
which we have just been attending — only that now it is a 
superior type of man instead of a wandering savage who is 
subjugated, and that the subjugating force is spiritual rather 
than physical. What seems to me likely is that Nietzsche gen- 
eralized from instances of this kind. The passage is in a later 
book than Genealogy of Morals, but the reflection may have 
been earlier. A similar psychology of bad conscience is pre- 
supposed in another passage. Answering the question, "What 
is it in Christianity we fight against?" he says, "That it seeks 
to crush the strong, to take away their spirit, to exploit their 
bad hours and wearinesses, to convert their proud assurance 
20 Twilight of the Idols, vii, § 2. 



BAD CONSCIENCE 281 

into unrest and distress of conscience; that it knows how to 
turn superior instincts into poison and to make them sick, till 
their force, their will to power turns backwards, turns against 
themselves — till the strong go to pieces from the extravagances 
of their self -contempt and self -mistreatment : that appalling 
way of going to pieces, the most illustrious example of which 
is furnished by Pascal. ' ' 21 The same essential idea is repeated 
when he says that now that the slave-morality of humility, 
selflessness, absolute obedience has conquered in the world, ruling 
natures are condemned either to hypocrisy or to torments of 
conscience. 22 It is an identical inner experience in all these 
cases, and the process of generating it is the same. Whether 
the conquerors are an early superior race or a refined spiritual 
power like Christianity, whether those conquered are primitive 
roving populations or splendid examples of the "blond beast, " 
like German nobles of the early Middle Ages, conquest lies at 
the basis of the phenomenon, instincts that had been free and 
strong before turning while still strong against their possessor 
and making him ill. The amount of truth in the view may be 
left to future criticism to disentangle. 

Despite Nietzsche's unsympathetic tone, he is far from re- 
garding the rise of bad conscience as an unmixed evil — and he 
warns us against thinking lightly of it. Let one read § 18, and 
note also the close of § 16, of Genealogy of Morals, II. When — 
he says in substance — man turns against himself in the way 
described, when his old Bosheit is directed inward, a new line of 
possibilities is opened for him; he awakens an interest, a sur- 
prise, a hope, almost a certainty, as if something were heralding 
itself in him, as if he were no goal, but only a way, an episode, 
a bridge, a great promise. Sickness is utilizable — it is one of 
Nietzsche's constant points of view — and this sickness may be 
one only as pregnancy is. 23 A new kind of self may be fash- 
ioned by the cruel instincts working remorselessly on the ma- 
terial against which they turn — if they criticise, contradict, 
despise, say "no" to this and that and burn it in, it may all be 
to this end. He speaks of this active bad conscience as a veritable 

21 Will to Power, §252 (the italics are mine). As to Pascal, cL 
Beyond Good and Evil, § 229 ; The Antichristian, § 5. 

22 Will to Power, § 870 (italics are mine). 
28 Genealogy etc., II, § 19. 



282 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

womb of ideal and imaginative results, a bringer forth of a 
fullness of new strange affirmations and beauties. It may be, 
he adds, that it first created beauty in general — "for what 
would 'beautiful' mean, if contradiction had not first been sensi- 
bly felt, if the ugly had not first said to itself, 'I am ugly'?" 
At least, after this hint, he thinks that the enigma becomes less 
enigmatical how far an ideal, a beauty may be intimated in 
contradictory conceptions such as self-lessness, self-denial, self- 
sacrifice — one thing being henceforth plain, namely, of what 
sort the pleasure is from the start which the selfless, self- 
denying, self-sacrificing person experiences : it is a pleasure be- 
longing to cruelty. 24 This line of reflection is developed but a 
very little way, and Nietzsche is far from reaching a balanced 
view on the general subject. But we may say with assurance 
that he was not without appreciation for ascetic ideals, and 
recognized a place for them in the world, even if he did not 
personally share them. 25 Moreover, he had no repugnance to 
bad conscience in itself; he wished rather, as we have already 
seen, to create it in a new form, to give it to persons quite 
innocent of it at the present time, namely, to those who, dis- 
loyal to this world, cultivate - other-world aspirations, anti- 
natural ideas — to Christians (of the historic type), to followers 
of Schopenhauer. 26 He once said that for some a spasm of 
repentance may be the highest exercise of their humanity, 27 and 
he wanted the Christian world to have a taste — and more than 
a taste — of it. Whether he was strong enough to conquer in 
this fashion and breed bad conscience anew — for it is a question 
of strength and conquest — is one of the future's problems. 

24 Nietzsche makes a supplementary remark here: "So much toward 
tracing the origin of the ' unegoistic ' as a moral value, and toward 
marking out the soil out of which this value has grown: first bad con- 
science, first the will for self-mistreatment furnishes the presupposition 
for the value of the unegoistic" (ibid., II, §18). Nietzsche must use 
" unegoistic " here in a more special sense than that in which he recognized 
the significance and value of the unegoistic for social formations in general, 
as noted previously (pp. 216-7) ; and even the present remark does not 
deny the value of the unegoistic. 

25 See the discussion of ascetic ideals in Genealogy etc., Ill — the 
whole of the treatise is devoted to that subject. In a certain broad (not 
the Christian ) sense, it may be a question whether Nietzsche did not share 
ascetic ideals. 

26 Cf. Genealogy etc., II, §24. 

27 Beyond Good and Evil, § 252. 



A MORAL ORDER 283 



n 

The idea of a moral order in the world rests ultimately, 
according to Nietzsche, on an attempt to infect the very nature 
of things with conceptions of guilt and punishment such as those 
we have been considering. 28 He states the personal form of the 
assumption thus : ' ' That there is a will of God as to what man 
is to do, to refrain from doing; that the worth of a people, or 
an individual, is determined by the extent to which the will 
of God is obeyed ; that in the fortunes of a people or individual, 
the will of God demonstrates itself as governing, i.e., as pun- 
ishing and rewarding according to the degree of obedience. ' ' w 
We may substitute for the "will of God" here an "Eternal 
Tendency making for righteousness ' ' in the world, or the ' ' Moral 
Law" (as often conceived), and say virtually the same thing, 

" Nur mit ein bischen andem Worten." 

Nietzsche thinks that the idea arose somewhat as follows 30 : — The 
starting-point is individuals conceived of as in debt or guilty 
toward the community. The community is seen, however, to be 
not of the moment only, but an extension of the past, so that 
there is debt to ancestors as well as to the existing generation. 
The debt thus grows larger, and sacrifices are an endeavor to 
repay. In time the remotest ancestors become heroes, Gods — 
particularly does this happen with the ancestors of a powerful 
and conquering race. Finally, perhaps as the result of a con- 
flict of races and the ascendancy of some one, the idea arises 
of a supreme, perhaps an only, God. The exact nature of the 
God-making process is a secondary matter ; the important point 
is that at last debt or guilt to a God arises. Disobedience to 
the community's mores becomes trespass against the God, sin; 
if the mores are reduced to what I have ventured to call essen- 
tial morality, this is none the less, rather the more the case. 
And now what is the requital for guilt in the new situation,, 
what the satisfaction to the Invisible Creditor? Essentially the 

28 Cf. Genealogy etc., II, §22; Werke, XI, 373, §569; Zarathustra, 
II, v, xx ; Will to Power, § 1021; The Antichristian, § 26. 

29 The Antichristian, § 26. 

30 Cf. Genealogy etc., II, §§ 19-22. There is an imperfect anticipatory 
statement of the general view in Zarathustra, II, xx. 



284 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

same as to the human creditor. As in lieu of the unpaid debt, 
the latter could exact a certain amount of pain and humiliation, 
so with the God. To him also suffering is an equivalent (Aus- 
gleichung) for loss — he too is satisfied when he can inflict or 
witness it ; he has pleasure in suffering, i.e., cruel instincts, just 
as man has — only as his debtor presents him the spectacle of 
suffering, is he reconciled. The religions of antiquity, the so- 
called "ethical religions" included (except atheistic Buddhism), 
do not get beyond this circle of conceptions. For all wrong- 
doing pain must follow — it is the satisfaction or compensation 
par excellence. Even Christianity is no exception — I mean of 
course the historical movement going by that name, not modern 
rationalizations or emasculations. It perpetuates the Israelit- 
ish view that sin is debt and must be paid, atoned for, 31 and 
sometimes the guilt is so great that it cannot be atoned for, i.e., 
suffering must continue without end. It is true that Christianity 
is a redemptive religion, but this does not mean that satisfaction 
is not exacted, but only that it is rendered by other than the 
guilty parties — one next to God paid with his sufferings the debt 
due from men (or, shall we say? from some men, since the rest 
have still to suffer and to suffer forever ). b 

"Sorrow follows wrong" — this Sophoclean refrain contains 
the gist of the idea of a moral order. It is accordingly an easy 
inference that wherever we find sorrow (suffering or ill-fortune), 
wrong must have preceded it. 32c So the prophets of ancient 
Israel interpreted the calamities which befell that people; and 
it was with such a view that later priestly hands rewrote and 
more or less falsified the early history of the nation, attributing 
successes to obedience and reverses to disobedience to the na- 
tion's God. 33 Sometimes the view is carried to such lengths — 
for example by Schopenhauer — that life itself, in which so 
much suffering is involved, is regarded in the light of a punish- 
ment, the result of a fall (Abfall) in metaphysical regions ; and 
if all earthly things pass away, it is thought to show that they 
ought to pass away, eternal justice demanding the penalty. 34 

81 Cf. Ezekiel xviii, 4; Romans vi, 23; James i, 15. 

32 On the moral interpretation of misfortune, see Dawn of Day, §§78, 
86 (cf. §§10, 21). 

33 The Antichristian, §§ 25-6. 

84 Cf. Zarathustra, II, xx. * 



A MORAL ORDER 285 

We in America and England are familiar with a more compre- 
hensible and less ambitious form of the same belief in Matthew 
Arnold's attempt to find chiefly moral causes for the downfall 
of men and nations — to make life and history so far a parable 
of a moral order. It is a form of faith to which some of us 
have clung the more, if we have had to renounce much that we 
once held sacred; for with it we could still feel morality to be 
central in the scheme of things, and so far have an object 
of quasi-religious reverence. Whether, we have said to our- 
selves, a God inflicts harm and suffering on man for wrong- 
doing or not, they are inflicted — there is a natural and necessary 
connection between righteousness and life, and between un- 
righteousness and death; even if men succeed outwardly in 
wrongdoing, their conscience does not leave them at ease, and 
sooner or later their success is undone. But Nietzsche's criti- 
cism follows us even into this stronghold. It is true that wrong, 
in the strict sense, i.e., breaking an agreement, brings naturally 
inner unrest to one doing it, and ordinarily has to be com- 
pensated for as well. 35 But wrong in the broad sense in which 
it is often used, wrong as injury and intent to injure simply, 
does not necessarily have these consequences. If there is no 
agreement, explicit or implicit, to the contrary— and there is 
implicit agreement between all members of the same group or 
community — injury need cause no bad conscience. There was 
no bad conscience (according to Nietzsche's view 36 ), when early 
superior races fell on wandering populations and deprived them 
of their liberty, as described in the earlier part of the chapter — 
not even if they did all manner of violence to them. Even 
within the same society, if it is a caste society and the division 
of classes is recognized as beneficent or at least necessary, the 
ruling class may accept sacrifices from the classes below them 
without twinges of conscience, and the lower classes may not 
feel wronged in having to make them. 37 It is an error in psy- 
chology to think that hose men are necessarily wretched inwardly, 

35 Cf. Nietzsche's personal confession, " Let one talk as one will about 
all kinds of immorality: but to be able to endure it! For example, I 
could not endure a broken word, or even a murder: wasting away (Siech- 
thum) and ruin would sooner or later be my lot! — quite apart from a 
knowledge of the misdeed or punishment for it " ( Werke, XII, 224, § 486 ) . 

86 Cf. Genealogy etc., I, §11. 

87 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 258. 



286 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

or that the passionate are unhappy. 38 There are bose men who 
are happy — a species about whom moralists are silent. 39 Bose 
impulses become unpleasant when carried to excess or when 
inhibited by other impulses — they are so far like impulses in 
general, like pity, for example, which may be felt as miserable 
weakness, or like thinking, which when unrestrained may be- 
come painful. 40 More suffering comes from opinions about the 
passions than from the passions themselves. 41 Indeed, why it is 
suffering that must needs follow an evil deed is not clear — why 
not as well another evil deed? 42 That the evildoer's work is 
undone sooner or later is equally a doubtful proposition — 
indeed it is less likely to happen later than earlier, since an 
order of things may be established on that basis and this be 
consented to all around. Nietzsche sums the matter up by 
saying, ' ' That in the consequences of actions reward and punish- 
ment are already contained — this thought of an immanent jus- 
tice is fundamentally false"; 43 and, commenting on the Laws 
of Manu, he offers interesting suggestions as to the way in which 
the natural consequences of actions have been turned into re- 
wards and punishments. 44 As for a moral order in the more 
general sense that the good, kindly, benevolent impulses have 
a natural sanction, in that they alone contribute to man's 
advancement and progress, we have already seen Nietzsche con- 
testing such a premise. Evil (bose), unfriendly, destructive 
impulses are as vital in the total economy of the world as those 
called good. It is as necessary to be evil to things that cumber 
the ground as to be good to those that have the promise and 
power of life. 

in 

I pass over briefly Nietzsche's scattering remarks on obliga- 
tion or "ought" — there is no special treatment of the subject 
and his view may be anticipated from what has gone before. 
"Ought" is primarily a phenomenon in contractual relations — 

39 Joyful Science, § 326. 

89 Beyond Good and Evil, § 39. 

40 Werke, XI, 201, § 115. 

41 Ibid., XI, 202, § 116. 

42 Ibid., XIII, 315, § 770. 

* a Ibid., XIII, 315, §770; cf. Dawn of Day, §563. 
44 Werke, XIV, 120-1, §§ 254-5. 



OUGHT 287 

for in every exchange not completed at once, the debtor binds 
himself and is in turn bound; and yet wherever there is a 
relation of enforced subordination, whether of individuals to 
other individuals, of individuals to a group, or of impulses to 
other impulses in the same individual, something similar arises. 
From the controlling side, it means, "so must you do," from 
the controlled, "so must I do." At bottom it is a relation of 
wills, one commanding, the other obeying — for there is no sense 
in a command, where there is not something to obey. 45 This 
holds of an individual's inner life as truly as of society: one 
impulse gets on top, commands, the others have to obey. 46 That 
regulation of impulses which is implied in morality rests in 
the last resort on one impulse that has the upper hand. 47 In 
relation to this dominant impulse, we have to let the question 
Why? go. 48 Of an ought over and above human relations and 
human wills, Nietzsche knows nothing. 49 d "Ought" is our 
creation, though it is a necessary one, growing out of the fact 
that we are at bottom wills — and will must either command or 
obey. The great man must command, cannot be saved from 
doing so; and his imperative "thou oughtst" is not derived 
from the nature of things, but seeing the higher he must put 
it through, compel obedience to it. 50 There is nothing wrong 
or unnatural in this — rather may it be as natural for the 
weaker, the unsteadier, to obey as for the stronger and 
higher to command; it may be positively easier for the 
weaker to do this after the first recalcitrancy, 51 may be 
even a relief [compare, I may say on my own account, the 
sentiment of Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty"]. e That is, two 
types of individuals may fit organically together in a society — 
and two kinds of impulses may fit organically together in a 
single soul. 52 There is thus a strictly natural order of rank in 
the world (Rangordnung) . The order of precedence, the 

45 Werke, XIII, 216, §511. Even Kant said, " Denn dieses Sollen ist 
eigentlich ein Wollen" {Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Bitten, ed. von 
Kirchman, p. 78 ) . 

"Ibid., XI, 221, § 155; cf. 199, § 109- 

"Ibid., XI, 200, §111. 

48 Ibid., XI, 201, §114. 

49 Ibid., XIV, 320, § 155. 
°°Ibid., XIV, 103, §227. 

61 For all impulses want to rule for the moment at least. 

62 Cf. Werke, XIII, 105, § 246; 170, § 393. 



288 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

classification of higher and lower, which appears in a social 
group, is typical of a phenomenon that is universal in nature — 
at least in organic nature. "We may consider all that has to 
be done to preserve the organism as a 'moral demand': there 
is a 'thou oughtst' for the single organs which comes to them 
from the commanding organ. ' ' K 

IV 

We are accordingly led straightway to what Nietzsche con- 
siders the very problematical notion of equality. He takes 
it broadly — perhaps too broadly — and appears to have no 
objection to it in and for itself. We may seek equality, he 
says, either by bringing others down to our level, or by raising 
ourselves and all up to a higher level. 54 He has, too, as we 
have already seen, a sense of the intimate unity of human nature 
and is instinctively offended at the thought of using others 
merely as means to our own ends. 55 He admits that it was the 
noblest spirits who were led astray by the ideas of the French 
Eevolution, in which "equality" played so large a part 
(though he makes an exception in the case of Goethe). 56 And 
yet in the actual constitution of things there is more inequality 
than equality — and not merely artificial inequality owing to 
outer conditions, but natural inequality. The mark of a good 
man for Schopenhauer was "that he less than the rest makes 
a difference between himself and others''; 57 but if differences 
exist, what boots it? Must the good man be a little blind — 
an idealist, or an artist? A tendency of goodness to stupidity 
(Dummheit) has been already noticed. It is sometimes said 
that to God all men are equal, and Carlyle spoke of Islam as 
a "perfect equalizer of men"; 58 but so from a high mountain 
the tallest men are pygmies like the rest — there is no distin- 
guishing vision from so far off. f Nietzsche does not question 
that it may be expedient to treat men as equal under certain 
circumstances or that there are conditions in which differences 

**IMd., XIII, 170, §392; cf. the tone of XII, 358, §675. 

D4 Human, etc., § 300. 

65 Ibid., § 524, and see ante, pp. 65, 126. 

68 Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 48. 

67 Werke, XIV, 85, § 168, quoting from Schopenhauer's Grundlage der 
Moral, § 22. 

68 Heroes and Hero-Worship, Lect. II. 



EQUALITY 289 

between them may be actually negligible. He notes, for in- 
stance, that after some hours of mountain climbing a scamp 
and a saint are two tolerably similar creatures — exhaustion 
being the shortest way to equality and brotherhood. 59 He gives 
also a serious instance. When communities are first organized 
and all alike are in need of protection from the enemy, men 
may be considered equal. Even long-established communities 
manifest equalitarian tendencies, whenever danger arises, such 
as war or earthquake or flood — differences of rank and privilege 
being quite lost sight of in face of a common misfortune. But 
save in these exceptional circumstances, native differences be- 
tween men, gradations of rank of some sort, tend ever to appear 
in old and well-established communities; and this also happens 
whenever social order is broken down and anarchy sets in (cf. 
what happened at Corcyra, according to the account of Thucyd- 
ides). 60 The differences really exist all the time, however they 
may fail to show themselves, and Nietzsche thinks it not 
truthful or just not to recognize them, and estimate men ac- 
cordingly. As animal life ranks higher than plant life, and 
human life ranks above that of the animal, so there is an 
ascending scale of potencies in human life itself — all men are 
not on the same level: some are higher, others lower. 61 We in 
our day are apt to collocate equal with just — ''just and equal," 
we are accustomed to say. But if justice means giving to each 
his own (suum cuique), and if one person is on one level of life 
and another on another, then to treat them as if they were on 
the same level is not justice, but injustice. " Equality to 
those who are equal, inequality to those who are unequal" — this 
were the true teaching of justice. 62 " Wrong lies never in 
unequal rights, it lies in the claim to 'equal rights.' " 63 "The 
doctrine of equality! . . . But there is no more poisonous 
poison; for it appears to be preached by justice itself, while it 
is the end of justice." 64 

The present-day sentiment in favor of equality becomes 

59 The Wanderer etc., § 263. 

eo Ibid., §31. 

01 Cf. Zarathustra, II, vii. 

62 Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 48. 

63 The Antichristian, §57; cf. Zarathustra, II, xvi. 

64 Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 48. 



290 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

then a curiosity to Nietzsche, and he seeks to account for it. 
He does so in this way — really two ways, which on the surface 
do not harmonize. First, he views it as an accompaniment of 
the dominating place which the mass have won in modern 
societies. 65 The instinct of the mass is to say (and there is 
something of the spirit of revenge in it), 66 " there are none 
better than we, all are equal, no one is to have rights and privi- 
leges above the rest." In other words, it is a doctrine for a 
purpose, a kind of tool in a class-war — the end being to bring 
all men into one class. Second, the doctrine is the reflection 
of a certain matter-of-fact resemblance — or process causing 
resemblance — which is accomplishing itself in the modern world. 
We latter-day beings are a mixture, purity of blood and race 
is disappearing — we are actually becoming alike: the old dif- 
ferences of high and low cut small figure. Gaps between man 
and man, between class and class, variety of types, a will to 
be oneself, to mark oneself off, the pathos of distance, — these 
are marks of every strong time; 67 but we are fallen on other 
days — we want no gaps, we are very sociable, it is sheep like 
sheep, and we hardly want a shepherd, ni dieu ni maitre, as our 
advance-guard, the socialists, sometimes say. 68e 

Some argue that while there may not be, and perhaps should 
not be, outer equality, there is an inner equality, that souls are 
equal; but Nietzsche questions it. Souls are as different as 
bodies; what strong ones endure and profit by may undo 
average natures — what nourishes and refreshes the higher kind 
of man may be to others poison. Dangerous books, for instance, 
that break in pieces and desolate lower souls may act like 
herald-calls to others and elicit their bravest. 69 His own books 
are not for all — he himself is not good for all: his problems 
address themselves in the nature of the case selectively to a 
few ears. 70h He questions indeed whether really great and 
beautiful things can be common property: pulchram est pau- 
corum hominum. 71 In the same way he sees basis for the dis- 

66 Werke, XIV, 68, § 134. 
ee Cf. Zarathustra, II, vii. 

67 Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 37. 

68 Werke, XIV, 68, § 134; Beyond Good and Evil, § 202. 

69 Will to Power, §§901, 904; Beyond Good and Evil, §30. 

70 Cf. Zarathustra, IX, xvii, § 1; Genealogy etc., I, §5. 

71 Twilight of the Idols, viii, § 5. 



EQUALITY 291 

tinctions of esoteric and exoteric in a doctrine or a religion, 
corresponding to different grades of intelligence in its fol- 
lowers. 72 Even the same words people understand differently 
— they have different feelings, scents, wishes, in connection with 
them: "what group of sensations and ideas are in the fore- 
ground of a soul and are quickest aroused, is the ultimately 
decisive thing about its rank." 73 Not all have a right to the 
same judgments; Nietzsche will not admit the right of others 
to criticise Wagner as he does. 74 He hates his pure "I will" 
from coarse mouths. 75 Independence is for the fewest — a privi- 
lege of the strong. 76 One must have the right even to do one's 
own thinking, and not all have it, for right is conditioned on 
power. 77 Men are indeed so different that there cannot be an 
universal law for them; it is selfishness to say that what I 
should do under given circumstances is imperative on all others 
— a blind kind of selfishness too, since it shows that I ]jave not 
yet discovered myself and created my own ideal, something 
that can never be that of another, not to say of all. 78 "And 
how indeed could there be a 'common good'! The expression 
contradicts itself: that which can be common has ever only 
small value. In the end it must be as it is and ever has been : 
great things remain for those who are great, abysses for the 
deep, delicate things and tremulous things for the fine, and, to 
sum up briefly, everything rare for the rare." 79 The way, the 
ideal, there is not ; that such a thing may be, all must be alike, 
on the same level. 80 

Nietzsche goes so far as to admit that, because of radical 
inequality, of ascending grades of life, sacrifice is necessary. 
Our natural instincts not only of sympathy, but of fair play, 
lead us to regard all forms of life, even the lowest, as ends in 
themselves and to wish for each a full and perfect development. 
But these instincts have only a limited scope in a world con- 

72 Beyond Good and Evil, § 30. 

73 WerJce, XIV, 411, §289. 

74 Ibid., XIV, 378-9, § 260. 

75 Ibid., XIV, 270, § 42. 

76 Beyond Good and Evil, §29. 

77 Zarathustra, I, xvii. 

78 Joyful Science, § 335. 

79 Beyond Good and Evil, §43. 

80 Cf. Zarathustra, III, xi, §2; Will to Power, §349. 



292 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

stituted like ours, and if we insist on following them absolutely 
we in effect posit another order of things than this we know — 
something which Schopenhauer did, at the same time turning 
his back on this world and feeling that the height of ethics was 
in renouncing it. For here, save within narrow limits, life lives 
off life — as the plant off the inorganic world, so the animal off 
the plant, and higher animal off the lower animal (or the 
plant) . There is no way of avoiding this — the law of sacrifice 
is ingrained into the constitution of things. The necessity ex- 
tends even to the relations of men with one another. That some 
may develope to their full stature, others must be content with 
less than theirs. At the basis of ancient culture, as already 
noted, were slaves, and slaves equally exist today, the only 
question being whether there is a culture compensating for the 
enormous sacrifices which they — our working, business, profes- 
sional classes — make. The law of sacrifice may be freely ac- 
cepted, but it cannot be changed; Nietzsche thinks that it has 
been accepted in the past and might conceivably be again. And 
perhaps (I may add on my own account), if our working and 
business and professional classes could see above and beyond 
them, and as a result of the freedom they make possible, an 
iEschylus, a Sophocles, a Phidias, an Aristotle, in short a drama, 
a sculpture, an architecture, a noble civic and intellectual life, 
like that of the ancient Greeks, they might be less unwilling 
to bring their sacrifice than they are — I say "perhaps" and 
"might," because the indications are at present that they think 
more of themselves than of anything else, and only care to 
"get out of life" (as the saying is) all that they possibly can. 



CHAPTER XXII 

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). THE "ALTRUISTIC" 

SENTIMENTS x 

A sense of the gradations of life noted in the last chapter under- 
lies also the discussion of the ' ' altruistic " a sentiments. These 
sentiments may be said to make up the finer, more inward, more 
spontaneous part of morality, as contrasted with conceptions 
such as rights, duties, justice, obligation. 13 



However inconsistently with views expressed in other 
connections, Nietzsche regards the roots of altruism as lying 
very deep in man — he even says in one place that more than 
any other animal, man is originally "altruistic." 2 He seems 
to look on two factors as co-operating to produce the 
result. On the one hand, social existence requires it, and, on 
the other, individuals themselves find compensation for a sense 
of their unimportance in serving others — mothers their chil- 
dren, slaves their masters, the soldier his commander, even the 
prince his people, and in general. 3 Pleasure in the group to 
which one belongs is really older than pleasure in oneself, and 
the sly, loveless ego that only seeks its own advantage in the 
advantage of others, is not the origin of the group but its de- 
struction. 4 Altruistic sentiment, however, implies egoism some- 
where or to some extent — not as its contrary, but as its com- 
plement and condition. If there is service there must be those 
willing to be served — individuals, or the group (as such) ; altru- 
istic sentiment cannot be universal and all-controlling. In fact, 
quite apart from individuals the group or community is almost 

1 The substance of this chapter appeared in The Hibbert Journal, 
October, 1914. 

2 Will to Power, § 771. 

3 Ibid., §§785, 964; Werke, XII, 104-5, §209; XIII, 178, §406. Cf. 
" Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 6, as to the way in which young men 
may compensate for their felt imperfection. 

4 Zarathustra, I, xv. 

293 



294 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

always egoistic, freely allowing its members to serve it, calling 
on them to do so, and even allowing them on occasion to injure 
themselves or be killed in its behalf. Many of the great ''vir- 
tues" are simply practices or qualities that serve this naive 
egoism of the community. If the community should itself be- 
come altruistic, it might sacrifice for individuls rather than 
allow them to sacrifice for it. That is, altruism taken as a 
universal maxim, conducts to an impasse. Only as a limit is 
set to it, is it really possible. 5 Perhaps some of my readers have 
found how difficult it is to deal with thoroughly altruistic 
people: they will scarcely allow us to do anything for them — 
they want to be ever giving, and are not willing to receive. In 
a way they are the most embarrassing people in the world — 
they frustrate our own virtue ! But though, taken universally, 
altruism is self-contradictory, it makes an excellent, rough, 
practical rule for great masses of people. The community's 
instinct of self-preservation is behind the sanction given to it; 
and most actually do best when they serve others or the 
community, rather than themselves — the "self," in their case, 
not being massive or important enough to justify special 
attention; where individual distinctions do not stand out, 
many, not to say all, are more important than one. 6 

But there is another way in which egoism is indispensable — 
egoism now of an active sort. The view appears in sayings 
like these : — Love your neighbor as yourselves, but first be such 
as love themselves — loving with a great love and a great con- 
tempt 7 (looking down on ourselves being a condition of our 
rising) . Grant that benevolence and beneficence make the good 
man, one must first be benevolent and beneficent to himself — 
else one is not a good man. 8 Making oneself into a whole person 
goes further in the direction of the general advantage than 
compassion towards others. 9 Hence there may be a "quite ideal 
selfishness. " 10 It involves an art — of all arts the finest and the 
one requiring most patience. In practising it we learn to endure 

6 The inherent contradictions in altruism as a principle were perhaps 
never better stated than in Joyful Science, § 21. 

6 Cf . Will to Power, § 269. 

7 Zarathustra, III, v, § 3. 

8 Dawn of Day, § 516. 

9 Human, etc., § 95. 

10 Dawn of Day, § 552. 



THE " ALTRUISTIC " SENTIMENTS 295 

being by ourselves and do not need to be ever roaming about. 11 
Even too much reading is to be guarded against, because then 
we learn to think only by reacting, not spontaneously. 12 The 
broad objection to a sweeping unegoistic morality is that it easily 
leads to sins of omission, and just because it has the guise of 
human friendliness, it seduces the higher, rarer type of man 
the most. 13 c So strong at this point is Nietzsche 's feeling that 
he is led to the view that the absolute supremacy of altruistic 
conceptions would be an indication of degeneration — for if all 
should find the significance of their lives in serving others, it 
would show that none found value in themselves, did not know 
how to protect and preserve themselves, had no real self (none 
worth while), and humanity would be so far on the downward 
grade. 14 Deficiency in personality revenges itself everywhere. 
A weakened, thin, obliterated, self-denying person is useful for 
no good thing — " selflessness ' ' of this type has no value for 
either heaven or earth. 15 

The egoism thus so strongly preached is, however, regarded 
for the most part under an ultimately altruistic perspective: 
it is for the good of others, however dimly or imper- 
sonally they may be conceived or far off they may be put. 
And yet Nietzsche raises a rather daring question: Why is 
the man better who is useful to others than one who is useful 
to himself? And the answer comes, that this is true when 
others are of more value, higher than oneself. But suppose that 
the contrary is true — that others are of less value: in such a 
situation, he who serves himself may be better, even if he does 
so at the expense of others. 16 The reasoning sounds cold- 
blooded, yet can hardly be gainsaid — and the underlying point 
of view conducts to important distinctions. The character of 
selfishness (if we use the opprobrious word, and Nietzsche, in 
a half -defiant way, sometimes does) much depends upon who 
it is that is selfish. When he speaks of the "wild waters and 
storm-floods of selfishness" in Europe in the sixteenth century, 
he means ordinary, vulgar selfishness — the selfishness of princes 
and peoples who were grabbing, among other things, for the 

11 Zarathustra, III, xi, § 2. ,4 Ticilight of the Idols, ix, § 35. 

12 Ecce Homo, II, § 8. 1B Daivn of Day, § 345. 

13 Beyond Good and Evil, § 221. 16 Werke, XIV, 63-4, § 123. 



296 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

possessions of the Catholic Church 17 — and this he despises as 
much as any one. Once he formally distinguishes two kinds 
of egoism : a sacred one that forces us to serve what is highest 
in us; another, the egoism of the cat, that wants only its life. 18 
Both are preservative — the only question is, of what? The 
higher kind of selfishness is so contrasted with the lower that 
he even refuses to call it by this name: " heroism is no selfish- 
ness (Eigennutz), for one perishes of it" 19 — this, though he is 
perfectly aware and expressly says that the higher virtue, so 
far from being selfless, is that into which one's very self goes. 20 
The distinction between the two kinds of selfishness and the 
two kinds of men is not sentimental or arbitrary. It turns 
on whether the selfishness represents the advancing or the 
retrogressive line of life. To quote: "Selfishness is worth as 
much as the man is worth physiologically who has it; it can 
have a very high worth, it can have no worth at all and be 
despicable. " 21 Some only want to receive and gather in — the 
weak, needy, sickly in body and mind; when such people say 
"all for myself," they are a horror (Grauen) to Nietzsche. But 
there are others who get and accumulate only to give out again 
in love : their selfishness, even if it is insatiable in gathering to 
itself, is sound and holy. 22 

n 

And yet what is love? Somewhat daringly and bluntly 
Nietzsche puts [finds] at the bottom of it a desire to possess. 
It| is not fundamentally different from, is a kind of spiritual 
form of, the feeling for property or for what we want to make 
such. 23 Love between the sexes, marriage, is palpably that : each 
wishes to possess the other, to possess indeed exclusively — here 
is the basis of jealousy. In very love one may kill, as Don 
Jose does Carmen; if he had not loved her, she might have 

17 Beyond Good and Evil, § 212. 

18 Letter to Lou Salome, quoted by D. Halevy, Vie de Fre'de'ric Nietz- 
sche, p. 25. Cf. the reference to " cats and wolves," Zarathustra, I, xxii, 
§2. 

19 Werke, XIV, 216, § 245. 

20 Zarathustra, II, v. 

21 Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 33. 

22 Zarathustra, I, xxii. The self-love of the sickly and diseased 
(Siichtigen) "stinkt" (ibid., Ill, xi, §2). 

23 Werke, XII, 104, § 208. 



THE " ALTRUISTIC " SENTIMENTS 297 

gone to other men. 24 On other levels, too, love shows its root 
character — though in subtler form. What is love of truth but 
desire to get it, to make it our own, to be so far enriched — and 
what does love of new truth often mean but that, acquainted 
with and perhaps a little tired of what we have, we reach out 
our insatiable hands for more? Is the love of our neighbors 
quite destitute of the desire to have something of our own in 
them? And when with sympathetic heart we help and tend 
those who are suffering or ill, is there not some secret pleasure 
in thus extending our power over them, in feeling that for the 
moment they are ours? We may not confess it to ourselves — 
but suppose that we are told that we are unnecessary, is it not 
as if something were taken from us ? The desire for possession 
may have very subtle shades. 25 Does this, then, mean that there 
cannot be an unselfish desire to give and bestow? Not at all, 
but (says Nietzsche in effect) let us analyze what is meant by 
such a desire. Here, for instance, is a philosopher who wants 
to give his ideas to the world. In the first place, let us not be 
too ready to credit him with unselfishness. Very possibly he 
simply wants to impress himself upon the world, to put his 
mark on it, and so far make it his world — philosophers gen- 
erally, especially the great ones, want to rule. 26 And yet we 
can imagine that pure blessing may be the aim — and if 
philosophers are not frequent instances, there are plenty of 
instances from other walks in life, parents, for example, or 
wherever the essentially parental impulse manifests itself. 27 But 
what is the real psychology of this unselfishness? Nietzsche 
can only answer: the soul is full, over-full, and has to give. 
For love may be of two kinds : here a soul is empty and wants 
to be full; there a soul is already overflowing and wants to 
pour itself out. Both seek an object to satisfy their needs, and 
really the full soul is as needy and is as much prompted by the 
sense of need as the empty one — neither is, strictly speaking, 
unegoistic. 28 Some of the supreme passages in Nietzsche are 

2 *"The Case of Wagner," §2. There is the same implication in 
Jahweh's frankly calling himself a " jealous God." 

25 Joyful Science, § 14. 

26 Cf. Werke, XIII, 177, §406; Will to Power, §874. 
2T Werke, XII, 253, § 228. 

28 Dawn of Day, § 145. 



298 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

those in which he pictures the great soul giving. "When Zara- 
thustra is expostulated with for leaving his high solitudes to 
come down among men, his answer is, "I love men — I bring 
to them a gift. ' ' ffl When the mountain comes down to the 
valley and the winds from the heights descend to the levels 
below, what is the right name for such a longing ? Zarathustra 
asks, and ''bestowing virtue" is the only answer he can give. 30 
It is a love that does not wait to be thanked, but thanks any 
one who will receive it — a love that suffers if it cannot pour 
itself out. 31 Perhaps when we reach this love, if only in imagina- 
tion, it does not matter much what we call it, egoistic, unegoistic, 
selfish, unselfish — words, categories, being but 

" Sound and smoke, 
Hiding heaven's glow." 

Nietzsche criticises the " golden rule." He considers it first 
as a dictate of prudence, showing that one's ends are not neces- 
sarily reached in the manner prescribed by the rule, and remark- 
ing that one's best actions are marked by a disregard of pru- 
dence anyway; but secondly and principally in so far as the 
notion of equality lies behind it. So far as men are equal, it 
is indeed a reasonable requirement, and the flock instinct, dis- 
regarding differences between the members of the flock, is 
behind it. 32 But so far as men are unlike, it is without applica- 
tion. What a great man does, that others cannot do to him. 
"What thou doest, no one can do to thee in return." Moreover, 
"What I do not wish that you should do to me, why may I 
not be allowed to do it to you ? And, indeed, what I must do to 
you, just that you could not do to me. ' ' ® The thought is that, 
so far as men are different, their powers and privileges and 
duties are different. 

That, however, Nietzsche was inspired by no lack of con- 
sideration and tenderness for others appears in what he says 
of the treatment of injuries. It is paradoxical in form, and 
the reader is liable to be shocked by it at first. Zarathustra is 

29 Zarathustra, prologue, § 2. 

30 Ibid., Ill, x, § 2. 

31 "Dionysus Dithyrambs" ("Of the Poverty of the Richest"). 
82 Will to Power, § 925. 

33 Zarathustra, III, xii, §4; Werhe, XIV, 303, §120. 



1 



THE " ALTRUISTIC " SENTIMENTS 299 

the speaker, and he says (in substance), "If you have an enemy, 
do not return his evil with good — that will humiliate him; if 
he curses you, curse a little back ; if he does you a great wrong, 
do him a few small ones — dreadful to behold is one under the 
weight of wrong that he has done alone ; more humane is a little 
revenge than absolutely no revenge. " M Of course, this has to 
be taken in the spirit rather than the letter (like the paradoxes 
of the Sermon on the Mount), but we do not have to attend 
long to see that an extreme (if you will, fantastical) tenderness 
breathes through it. A certain great apostle urged returning 
the evil of an enemy with good, "for in so doing thou shalt 
heap coals of fire on his head." One can hardly say that ten- 
derness for the wrongdoer inspires that; the desire is rather to 
cover with shame — the subtlest spirit of revenge breathes 
through it. Which is the truer, or even more Christian spirit, 
I leave the reader to judge. Nietzsche wanted to spare shame 
and to purge the world of the spirit of revenge. As he put it, 
he desired a justice that should be "love with seeing eyes," 
and that would absolve all, save him who judges. At the same 
time he knew that this was not a height for every one, but only 
for those rich in inner wealth, the overflowing. 35 

The analysis of sacrifice resembles that of "love": on the 
one hand there is a psychological Aufklarung; on the other 
an assertion of the thing itself, so strong that to many it may 
seem extreme. It is not unselfish, he declares, when I 
prefer to think about causality rather than about the lawsuit 
with my publisher; my advantage and my enjoyment lie on 
the side of knowledge; my tension, unrest, passion, have been 
longest active just there. 36 Hence he finds something hypo- 
critical in the current language about sacrifice. Naturally, he 
says, in order to accomplish what lies near his heart, he throws 
much away — much that also lies near his heart; but the throw- 
ing away is only consequence, incidental result — the bottom 
fact is that something else lies nearest his heart. 37 And this 
is why a proposal to reward sacrifice is inept. Nietzsche even 

34 Zarathustra, I, xix. 

35 Ibid., I, xix. 

86 Werke, XIV, 95, § 197. 

37 Ibid., 94, §196; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §220; Twilight etc., 
ix, § 44; Will to Power, §§ 372, 930. 



300 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

demurs at speaking of virtue as its own reward — he dislikes 
the latter word altogether. When, Zarathustra asks, was it ever 
heard that a mother would be repaid for her love? and a man 
should love his virtue as his child. 38 

"Who will be paid? 
The saleable." 39 

1 'You are too pure for the soil of the words revenge, punish- 
ment, reward, requital." 40 And yet sacrifice (for he does not 
eschew the word) may go far. Virtue, in the great sense, is an 
arrow of yearning and a willingness to disappear. 41 To be free 
in any great way is to be indifferent to hardship, severity, 
privation, even to life ; to be ready to sacrifice men for a cause, 
oneself not excepted. 42 Nietzsche's mind goes back to ancient 
customs, and he says, "whoever is the first-born, he is ever 
sacrificed. Now we are the first-born. But so wills it our kind 
and species; and I love those who will not hold themselves 
back." 43 

With perspectives like these Nietzsche criticises "love of 
neighbors. " Higher than love to those near us is love to those 
far away. Yes, higher than love to men is love to things 
(Sachen) and ghosts {Gespenster) . "This ghost that follows 
thee, my brother, is more beautiful than thou ; why givest thou 
not to it thy flesh and thy bones? But thou art afraid and 
fleest to thy neighbor. . . . Let the future and what is furthest 
off! be the motive of thy to-day. ' ' M More prosaically he puts 
his idea and demand thus: "to bring beings to existence who 
shall stand elevated above the whole species 'man'; and to 
sacrifice ourselves and our neighbors to this end." 45 The mo- 
tive is still love, but love with distant instead of near per- 
spectives. He formulates the "new problem" in this way: 
whether a part of mankind might not by training be developed 

88 Zarathustra, II, v. 

39 " Dionysus Dithyrambs " (" Glory and Eternity "), 

40 Zarathustra, II, v. 

41 Ibid., prologue, § 4. 

42 Twilight etc., ix, § 38. 

43 Zarathustra, III, xii, § 6. 

44 Ibid., I, xvi. 

46 Werke, XIV, 262, § 4. 



I 



THE " ALTRUISTIC " SENTIMENTS SOI 

into a higher race at the expense of the rest. 46 Sacrifice would 
thus become part of a deliberate program. Undoubtedly to 
most the thought is repulsive. We may sacrifice ourselves, but 
how can we exact sacrifice from others ? How can we willingly 
contemplate men suffering, living stunted lives, or dying pre- 
maturely — all for an end beyond themselves? But suppose 
they consented to the sacrifice. Suppose that with some dim 
sense of a greatness to come they were willing to be used up, 
and to disappear when they could no longer serve ? That were 
a possibility not ordinarily reckoned with. Indeed, our pre- 
vailing methods of thought today tend to keep it out of mind. 
We want to alleviate men's lot. Our altars are to pity. The 
idea is abroad that no one should suffer or be sacrificed. All 
have rights to what pleasure and enjoyment can be got out of 
life, we say — and they, the great mass, are beginning to say 
so too. Unconsciously we play into their latent instincts of 
self-assertion, their egoism — not now the egoism that gives, but 
the egoism that takes and that takes all it can get. 
Where do we hear nowadays that men might willingly 
deny themselves or even disappear for a glory possible to 
mankind? There may be such voices, but I do not hear 
them. The result is that all classes, "high" and "low" (to 
use the conventional terms), are pervaded by the same greed 
for near and personal goods. But Nietzsche credits better 
things of men, of the "low" as well as the "high," even of 
those who are no longer of any use in life — all might be guided 
by the thought of a great end beyond them, willingly enduring 
hardship and even consenting to end their lives when it is better 
not to live. 47 

ra 

And now I come to that part of my subject about which 
perhaps more nonsense has been uttered than about any other 
aspect of this debatable thinker — his view of pity. The current 
idea is that Nietzsche was a sort of monster. "Close the hos- 
pitals, let the weak perish and tend the strong" — this is sup- 

"Ibid., XII, 121, §237. 

"Dawn of Day, §146; Twilight etc., ix, §36; cf. Zarathustra, I, 
xxi; The Wanderer etc., §185; Human, etc., §§80, 88; Joyful Science, 
§ 131. 



302 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

posed to be his counsel. 48 It is a doctrine inciting "the overman 
ruthlessly to trample under foot the servile herd of the weak, 
degenerate, and poor in spirit,'' according to the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica.® The ironical remark is made that in his last days 
Nietzsche "had to be cared for by Christian charity — Christian 
charity, which in health had been the object of his bitterest 
attack. ' ' d The late Professor William Wallace was one of the 
few English-speaking writers of distinction to attend carefully 
enough to Nietzsche's thought to get his real meaning. 50 

The German word is "Mitleid." "Mitgefuhl," fellow- 
feeling in general, is one of Nietzsche 's ' ' four virtues. " 51 He 
also uses " Sympathie," where we should say "sympathy" (in 
the broad sense). 52 I remember no special criticism of fellow- 
feeling or sympathy. 6 It is pity that he dissects and estimates. 
Pity is, even more distinctly in the German word than in ours, 
suffering — suffering with, really suffering with suffering. It is, 
of course, a species of fellow-feeling or sympathy, but of this 
peculiar character. 

There was a special occasion for Nietzsche's analysis of 
pity — an occasion that we in America and England do not easily 
appreciate. Perhaps in general we are less reflective peoples 
than the Germans, and some problems that occupy them we 
hardly feel. Pessimism, i.e., the ripe philosophical view, not 
mere spleen or fits of indigestion, has no hold among us. But 
it was pessimism, spreading like a contagion through Germany 
and becoming almost a religion with many, pessimism of the 
peculiarly seducing type which Schopenhauer represented, that 
awoke Nietzsche to the necessity of criticising pity. For what 
is pessimism? Without pretending to a formal definition, I 
may say that it is a sense so great and so keen of the suffering 
and wrong in the world — of suffering and wrong, too, as bound 
up with the individual existence which characterizes the world — 
that one is led to turn his back on life. And how is release 
from life secured? By pity itself — at least, this is the first 

48 So J. G. Hibben in a sermon, as reported in Springfield Republican, 
January, 1913. 

49 Art., "Nietzsche." 

60 Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology etc., pp. 536-7. 

61 Beyond Oood and Evil, §284; cf. §290. 

62 E.g., in Will to Power, § 269. 



THE " ALTRUISTIC " SENTIMENTS 303 

step. For in pity, we take others' plight on ourselves, become 
one with it — and if we go far enough, we may almost cease to 
feel separately, individual craving and even individual con- 
sciousness tending to disappear ; partly in this way, and partly 
by actively mortifying ourselves, crucifying the instincts that 
lead to life, we sink at last into Nirvana. 53 It is pity in the 
light of its Schopenhauerian consequences of this description 
that fixed the attention of Nietzsche, and made him look into it 
and over it in all its forms and guises. 54 A sentiment similar 
in character, though unaccompanied by the radical general 
view, is characteristic of Christianity. Indeed, pity is an under 
(or over) note in modern socialism and anarchism, and in the 
modern democratic movement generally. 55 To Schopenhauer, 
pity was the essence of morality itself. f 

Now, I find no natural hardness of heart in Nietzsche, and, 
what is stranger, considering the common opinion, no failure 
to approve pity within limits. He once spoke of it as shameful 
to eat one's fill while others go hungry. 8 ''I am thinking/ ' he 
writes in relation to a friend who had had a sad experience, 
"how I can make a little joy for him, as proof of my great 
pity." h His sister says as to his experiences as ambulance 
nurse in the Franco-Prussian war: "What the sympathetic 
heart of my brother suffered at that time cannot be expressed; 
months after, he still heard the groans and agonized cries of 
the wounded. During the first year it was practically im- 
possible for him to speak of these happenings. ' ' re Nietzsche 
himself says in a general way that one who begins by unlearning 
the love of other people ends by finding nothing worthy of 
love. 57 He speaks reverently of Prometheus 's pity for men and 
sacrifice in their behalf. 581 Addressing judges, Zarathustra 
says, "Your putting to death should be an act of pity, not of 

63 See Nietzsche's moving description of the saint in the early tribute 
to Schopenhauer ( " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 5 ) . 

84 Cf. Genealogy etc., preface, §§5, 6; Beyond Good and Evil, §§222, 
293; Dawn of Day, §138; The Antichristian, §7; Will to Power, §82; 
also the comments of Simmel, op. cit., pp. 213-4; Vaihinger, op. cit., p. 88; 
Chatterton-Hill, op. cit., pp. 22, 69. There is a sarcastic reference to the 
" religion of pity " and its disciples in Joyful Science, § 377. 

05 Cf. Dawn of Day, § 132; Beyond Good and Evil, § 202. 

66 Leben etc., II, 682. 

67 Dawn of Day, § 401. 

68 Joyful Science, § 251. 



304 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

revenge. ' ' 59 ' ' That you are pitiful I presuppose ; to be without 
pity means to be sick in mind and body" — this though it is 
added that much mind is needed to dare to be pitiful. 60 Nietz- 
sche gratefully recognizes what the " spiritual men" of Chris- 
tianity have done for Europe in giving consolation to the 
suffering, courage to the oppressed and despairing, however 
otherwise these same men have sinned. 61 He speaks of the 
pity of the saint as pity for the soil (Schmutz) of the human, 
all-too-human. 62 One who says things like these can hardly be 
said to be without appreciation of pity. He does, indeed, speak 
of triumphing over pity at times — but this presupposes that 
one has it. His "higher men," called to great tasks of creation 
and destruction, are usually beings with normal sympathetic 
feelings — otherwise how could he speak of their not going to 
pieces from the suffering they bring ? & 

In fact, ordinary sympathetic feeling for those who are 
temporarily disabled or sick or otherwise unfortunate, such as 
we show in our homes or as the community shows in public 
institutions, I see no trace of disapproval of in Nietzsche: he 
rather comments with implied satisfaction on the immense 
amount of humanity attained by present-day mankind, though 
putting on the other side of the balance-sheet the fact of de- 
cadence. 64 He knows that communities as hard-hearted as he is 
sometimes supposed to have been simply could not hold 
together or live — and he once mentions the care of the 
sick and poor as among the natural customs and institu- 
tions of society (along with the state, courts of justice, and 
marriage). 65 

"What he has in mind in criticising pity comes out in the 
saying of Zarathustra, "Not your pity but your bravery has 
saved hitherto the unhappy " ; m and again in a remark that 
where there is the impulse to help, the unpleasant sensation 

09 Zarathustra, I, vi. 

60 Werke, XII, 297, § 344. 

41 Beyond Good and Evil, § 62. 

82 Ibid., § 271. 

88 Werke, XIV, 412, § 291. 

84 Will to Power, § 63. 

66 The Antichristian, § 26. A. W. Benn, ordinarily discriminating, 
misinterprets Nietzsche at this point (International Journal of Ethics, 
October, 1908, pp. 16-7). 

88 Zarathustra, I, x. 



THE "ALTRUISTIC" SENTIMENTS 305 

of pity is overcome. 67 For here pity is taken as feeling simply 
— and feeling of a sad and depressing sort. 68 If we 
become the echo of others' miseries, he questions whether 
we can be really helpful or quickening to them. 69 One 
day, as Zarathustra is walking along, he comes on a repulsive 
object which he at last makes out to be a human being ; at first 
pity overcomes him and he is described as sinking down like 
a falling tree, heavily; and then he arises, and, his face 
becoming hard, he speaks the truth to him. 70 Pity of itself 
weakens, unnerves — such is the idea. We know that the 
Greeks, viewing it in this light, classed it along with fear, and, 
according to Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy was to give, as 
it were, a vent to these emotions, and so effect a purgation of 
the soul. So Nietzsche says that if any one should go about 
seeking for occasions for pity and holding ever before his mind 
all the misery he could lay hold of in his neighborhood, he 
would inevitably become sick and melancholy. He who wishes 
to be a physician — a physician in any sense — must accordingly 
be on his guard, otherwise the depressing feeling may lame 
him and keep his fine hand from doing its proper work. 71 A 
reviewer of one of Mr. Galsworthy's recent books says: "The 
spectator in these vignettes . . . is always pensive, always 
passive, prone to lose himself in what might not unfairly be 
called an intoxication of pity." 72 Here is the point of view 
of a part of Nietzsche's criticism. Pity of this kind tends to 
leave things as they are — is a kind of sinking and melting 
before them; one who gives up to it is really taking his first 
step in the downward Schopenhauerian path. 

And yet when pity is active, 5 it may do harm unless it is 
guided. Much mind, Nietzsche urges, is needed in exercising 
it. With the sense of the danger connected with it, he once 
puts the problem thus: "To create circumstances in which 

87 Werke, XI, 230, § 179. 

68 Cf. Hoffding's remarks, op. cit. y pp. 149, 150; also Wallace's, op. 
cit., p. 237; and see Will to Power, §§ 44, 368. 

69 Dawn of Day, § 144. 

70 Zarathustra, IV, vii. 

71 Dawn of Day, § 134. By way of contrast, the superior man is said 
to help the unfortunate, not or scarcely from pity, but out of his over- 
flowing strength (Beyond Good and Evil, § 260). 

12 The Nation (New York), December 12, 1912. 



306 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

every one can help himself, and he himself decide whether he 
shall be helped." 73 Helping, he feels, is a delicate business; 
if the impulse to it were twice as strong as it is, 
life might become unendurable for many. Let a man think, 
he says, of the foolish things he is doing daily and 
hourly from solicitude for himself, and then what would 
happen if he became the object of a similar solicitude from 
others — why, we should want to flee when a "neighbor" ap- 
proached ! 7i "What has done more harm than the follies of the 
compassionate? asks Zarathustra. 75 Benevolence must be newly 
appraised, and the limitless injury perceived that is continually 
worked by benevolent acts — for example, what a subject for 
irony is the love of mothers ! 76 In short, pity is dangerous ; it 
must be held within limits, intelligence must master it — it must 
be habitually sifted by reason. 77 

I pass over the further and more detailed analysis of pity. 
At bottom it is not unlike the analysis of love and sacrifice, 
although it of course brings out the specific features of pity, 
such as that it is the opposite of admiration and means a 
looking down, and hence should be practised with shame, not 
publicly, out of regard for its object. 78 Nietzsche is, to my 
recollection, the first moralist to point out the lack of delicacy 
in pity as often shown, its intrusiveness — so that to be pro- 
tected from it is the instinct of many a fine nature, and a 
certain purification is necessary for us after we have shown it, 
inasmuch as we have gazed on another in suffering, and, in 
helping him, have hurt his pride. 79 k 

IV 

What, then, are the limits for pity? If one stops to reflect 
a moment, one sees that an answer to the question depends upon 
what sort of an ideal one has in his mind; indeed, upon 
whether one has any ultimate ideal. Early Christianity, for 

73 Werke, XIV, 261, § 3. 

74 Dawn of Day, § 143. 

75 Zarathustra, II, iii. 

78 Werke, XIII, 212, § 493. 

77 Will to Power, §928; Werke, XI, 270, §276. 

78 Dawn of Day, § 135; Zarathustra, II, iii. 

79 Zarathustra, IV, viii; Ecce Homo, I, §4; Beyond Good and Evil y 
§ 270; Werke, XIV, 360, § 227; Zarathustra, II, iii. 



THE " ALTRUISTIC " SENTIMENTS 307 

example, had its ideal — that of the kingdom of heaven. Into 
that heavenly order (whether to be consummated on this earth 
or not) were to be gathered the good, the just, the loving, the 
merciful, the pure — they from the Christian standpoint were 
the wheat of the harvests of the world, they were to be gar- 
nered up in the coming order for ever. It is a dream that still 
has power to charm the heart. But what of those of a different 
moral character — the chaff or waste of the world, or, to use 
still other images, the trees that bore no fruit, the salt that 
had no savor? Was this kind of material, this waste and 
wreckage of human life, to be tenderly regarded all the same, 
to be nursed, pitied, allowed to continue and perpetuate its 
kind ? Hardly : we know rather that the chaff was to be burnt 
up with unquenchable fire, the trees hewn down, the salt cast 
out and trodden under foot. I use the consequence not in the 
slightest as an objection to Christianity. There is the same 
logic implicit in any affirmation of a great end of life — and 
something kindred is involved in our most commonplace prac- 
tical purposes. If we have any good thing in mind, we reject 
what does not correspond to it. If we set out an orchard, we 
leave to one side trees that come maimed or broken from the 
nursery. If we send our apples to market, we exclude those 
below a certain grade. Well, Nietzsche had an ideal, an ultima 
ratio of human life. It was a wholly earthly (diesseitige) 
ideal, and yet it was of humanity rising to what may relatively 
be called superhuman heights, of men who should be half like 
Gods — not merely good, but much more, beings to be feared, 
revered as well as loved. They should be the consummate fruit 
of humanity's tree, and, if all could not be such men or super- 
men themselves, they could at least facilitate them, work for 
them, fit themselves into a scheme of social existence that would 
tend that way. Nietzsche conceives that humanity might actu- 
ally be turned into an organism working to this end — no longer 
then a disconnected, sprawling mass of atoms (smaller or 
larger) as at present, but a related, interdependent, organic 
whole — a whole with an aim, this aim. And so arises his prin- 
ciple of selection, and canon for pity. What will fit into an 
organism of this sort is worth preserving, what will not is not 
worth preserving. Equal regard for all material is impossible. 



808 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

What will make itself a part of an ascending humanity, of a 
process by which the type will be raised and the power and 
splendor of the species shine forth, what will at last give us 
"supermen"? — that is the critical question. If the energy of 
ascending life is in a man, or, if not just that, if he is willing 
to be used for ascending life, if he will do good work, even if 
only to stand and wait on those who are better than he, such 
a man is good, and all, high and low, will protect him; but if 
a man is a sponge, a parasite, unfruitful, unproductive— not 
to say diseased and degenerate — he is bad, and pity to him is 
misplaced. 

Nietzsche argues substantially in this way: there can be 
no solidarity in a society where there are unfruitful, unpro- 
ductive, and destructive elements, which may moreover have 
still more degenerate offspring than themselves; to this extent 
the law of altruism does not apply ; there is no right to help, to 
equality of lot, of unsound members — the organism is liable to 
perish if such a course is pursued; when within it the smallest 
organ fails to do its part in however slight degree, the organism 
degenerates; the physiologist accordingly — the social physi- 
ologist as truly as one who deals with a physical body — demands 
the removal of the degenerate part, denies solidarity with it, 
is at the farthest remove from pity for it. 80 Undoubtedly it is 
strong doctrine, and yet Nietzsche must not be taken to mean 
what he does not mean. It is not, for example, temporary 
illness or disability that he has in mind; I might almost say 
that it is not primarily sickness of the body at all, but rather 
of will and character, and bodily incapacity so far as it is a 
symptom of this, of defective life-energy. We read that Zara- 
thustra is gentle to the sick and wishes that they may recover 
and create a higher body for themselves. 81 It is the hopeless, 
the badly made in the beginning, that Nietzsche has in view. 
Secondly, he does not mean, as some have understood him, 
particularly the working class, the poor pecuniarily. Nietzsche 
has as much honor for the worker with his hands, as much 
sense of his necessity, his indispensableness in an organic 

80 Will to Power, §52; Ecce Homo, III, iv, §2; cf. Will to Power, 
§734. 

8 ' Zarathustra, I, iii. 



THE " ALTRUISTIC " SENTIMENTS 809 

humanity, as any one — he even questions if he need be poor as 
he now commonly is. 82 He means the defectives, the incapables, 
the "good-for-nothings" everywhere — men who hate a day's 
work more than they do vice or crime, and will live in idleness 
if they can; and these are not confined to the so-called lower 
classes in the community. 

And yet what do we modern peoples do, what have we been 
doing for centuries? Somehow we have acquired (Nietzsche 
thinks largely through Christian influence) the idea that men 
as such are beings of infinite worth, that all are equal before 
God, that we must love, cherish, protect, care for every one of 
them. And the idea of the individual's importance and of 
equality, equal rights, has taken political form in democracy 
and is now taking a still more accentuated form in the social- 
istic and anarchistic movements. The single person has become 
so important, so absolute in our eyes, that he can 't be sacrificed ; 
the sickly, degenerate, misshapen specimens of the race are, 
forsooth, ends in themselves along with the rest, and we must 
minister to them. And so here they are, apparently in accumu- 
lating numbers as time goes on, in view (and out of view) in 
all the great centers of population — so that a recent writer has 
calculated (let us hope that it is an overestimate) that while 
in England of "superior men" there are about one to four 
thousand of the population, of idiots and known imbeciles (not 
counting those kept out of sight) there are one to four hun- 
dred. 83 Not only can we not sacrifice these miserable individuals ; 
they think themselves that they can't be sacrificed — they feel 
that they have as much right to life as others : we have stuffed 
them up in a sense of their importance — have played, as 
thoughtless altruism is apt to do, into their egoism. Their 
methods of keeping themselves alive have become instincts, 
institutions, are called "humanity." 84 And the "good" man — 
and this is the terrible thing to Nietzsche — is just the one who 
takes the side of these miscarriages; goodness, as it is now 

82 Cf. Will to Power, § 764. This position of the worker will be 
considered at length in chap. xxix. 

83 Mrs. John Martin, Is Mankind Advancing? p. 48 n. Cf. A. J. 
Balfour, " High authorities, I believe, hold that at this moment in Britain 
we have so managed matters that congenital idiots increase faster than 
any other class of the population" {Theism and Humanism, 1915, p. 109). 

84 Will to Power, § 401. 



310 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

commonly conceived, being pre-eminently shown in pitying, 
caring for, and tending them. 85 

In other words, by following mistaken ideas we have cut 
athwart the law of selection, which is an inevitable part of the 
law of development. 86 We have ourselves acquired a sickly and 
unnatural sensibility (we can't stand the sight of suffering, we 
weak creatures of today) ; 87 we have stimulated the egoism of 
the sickly and degenerate, and, by holding fast in life great 
numbers of misshapen beings, have given to existence itself a 
gloomy and questionable aspect. 88 And for the result, Nietzsche 
holds, as I have said, Christianity chiefly responsible. 1 By 
giving, as it does, an absolute value to the individual, it makes 
it impossible to sacrifice him. Genuine human love is hard, full 
of self -conquest, because it needs sacrifice; while this pseudo- 
humanity which is called Christianity strives just that no one 
be sacrificed. 89 

Nietzsche is sometimes said to have been carried away by 
Darwin — his ideas have been called ''Darwinism gone mad. ,,m 
This is superficial (Nietzsche's attitude to Darwin was in reality 
a very mixed one), n indeed a bit childish, when one considers 
the role which the idea of selection has played in the world. 
Emerson, in "The World-Soul," says: 

" He serveth the servant, 

The brave he loves amain; 
He kills the cripple and the sick, 

And straight begins again; 
For gods delight in gods, 

And thrust the weak aside; 
To him who scorns their charities 

Their arms fly open wide." 

And this was before Darwin. Indeed, the idea of selection, of 
acceptance and unpitying rejection, of an immanent struggle 
for existence in the world, is as old as the Bible — as the prophet 

85 Ecce Homo, IV, §8; cf. Werke, XIV, 66-7, § 132; 119, §252. 
8e The Antichristian, § 7. 

87 Will to Power, § 52; Beyond Good and Evil, § 202. 

88 The Antichristian, § 7. Cf. Emerson (Representative Men, chap, i), 
" Enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like hills of 
ants, or of fleas — the more, the worse." 

89 Will to Power, §246. Emerson says, on the other hand, "The 
more of these drones perish, the better for the hive " ( The Conduct of Life, 
"Fate"). 



THE "ALTRUISTIC" SENTIMENTS 311 

Isaiah, with his doctrine of the survival of a remnant. The 
question is, what is to be selected ? Nature does not do so very 
ill herself, and, in Nietzsche's estimation, is not to be set down 
as unmoral because she is without pity for the degenerate; 90 
and yet man with clear vision might do better than nature, 
and avoid her enormous waste — he might substitute purposive 
selection for natural selection and intelligently aim at what 
she is blindly groping for, or at least making possible. 91 The 
aim which Nietzsche suggests is that organic aim, culminating 
in something transcendent, which I have hinted at. It springs 
from a love that looks far away, and conquers and transcends 
pity. "Spare not thy neighbor. Man [present man] is some- 
thing that must be surpassed. ' ' 92 

Just how the selective process is to be carried out in detail 
Nietzsche does not tell us — there is no systematic or special 
treatment of the subject. He hints at the segregation of unde- 
sirable elements. 93 He tells the story of a saint who recom- 
mended a father to kill a misshapen, sickly child, and who, 
when reproached with cruelty, said, "Is it not more cruel to 
allow it to live ? " M He urges a new and more sacred concep- 
tion of marriage. Are you a man, Zarathustra says, who dare 
wish for himself a child? Are you a victorious one, a self- 
conqueror, master of your senses, lord of your virtues? Not 
only onward shall you propagate yourself, but upward. Mar- 
riage : so call I the will of two to create one who is more than 
they who created him. 95 Those with only cattle-like dispositions 
in their bodies, it is elsewhere stated, should not have the right 
to marry. 96 Stern and exacting as all this sounds, Nietzsche is 
not conscious of any real inhumanity. 97 While he would not 
have the higher, stronger types leave their own tasks to tend 
the sickly, he has so little idea of wishing to put an end to 

90 Will to Power, § 52. 

81 Werke, XII, 123-4, §243; 191, §408. 

92 Zarathustra, III, xii, §4; cf. prologue, §3; also I, x; and Werke, 
XIV, 72, § 140. 

93 Dawn of Day, § 17; Genealogy etc., Ill, § 26. 

94 Joyful Science, § 73. 

95 Zarathustra, I, xx. 

96 Werke, XIV, 62, § 119. Cf. as to the chronic sick and neuras- 
thenics, Will to Power, § 734. 

97 Cf. the picture of future "humanity," Joyful Science, §337 (par- 
ticularly the close of the paragraph ) . 



312 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

the latter summarily that he wants them tended by the more 
spiritual and gifted members of their own class — defining thus 
the function of the ascetic priest. 98 He would make their lot 
as easy as possible. Ironical as it may sound — he does not 
mean it ironically — he would help them to pass away. When 
something has to fall, it may be a mercy to hasten its falling — 
such is his feeling." He puts it as a proposition of human love, 
his first proposition: the weakly and misshapen should pass 
away, and we should help them to this end. 100 He also hints 
that they may come to choose their own passing away, dying 
then in perhaps greater dignity than they have ever lived, and 
almost winning the right to life again. 101 

Such, then, and so inspired are the limits which Nietzsche 
would set to pity. 102 Pity of the prevailing, thoughtless kind 
he calls a crime against life, an extreme immorality — he does 
not mince his words in speaking of it. 103 Indeed, he goes 
further, and in a lofty way would not pity his own disciples. 
"To the men that concern me, I wish suffering, solitude, 
illness, mistreatment, disgrace. ... I have no pity for them, 
because I wish them the one thing that can prove today 
whether a man has value or not — that he hold his ground. ' ' m 
Yet the warnings which Nietzsche utters in general against pity 
are not, he says, for all, but rather for him and his kind, i.e., 
those who rise to his point of view; the implication being that 
otherwise to renounce pity might be mere callousness and 
brutality. 105 ° And how far he is from condemning pity per se f 
is shown in what he says of "our pity," "my pity." It is a 
pity for the too common lot of the higher, rarer types of men, 
seeing how easily they go to pieces, what a waste there often 
is of their capacities. 106 It is a pity over the low averages of 
human life, over the process of making men smaller, that he 
thinks is going on under Christian and democratic influence, 

98 Genealogy etc., Ill, §§ 14, 15. 

99 Zarathustra, III, xii, § 20. 

100 The Antichristian, § 2. 

101 Cf. footnote 47, p. 301. 

102 Edmund Burke spoke of "minds tinctured with humanity" — is 
not this a happy phrase, "tinctured," not controlled? 

108 Will to Power, § 246; cf. § 54. 

104 Ibid., § 910. 

105 Zarathustra, IV, vii. 

100 Beyond Good and Evil, § 269; Will to Power, § 367. 



THE "ALTRUISTIC" SENTIMENTS 313 

over the very pity of which we Christians are so proud, which 
does not see the place and necessity of suffering and sacrifice 
in the world — so pity, he says, against pity ! 107 Oh, for a 
glimpse now and then, he exclaims, of something perfect, 
wrought out to the end, happy, mighty, triumphant, in which 
there is still something to fear — of a man who justifies man, 
a complementary and redeeming instance, in view of whom we 
dare hold our faith in man ! But what he sees has a wearying 
effect upon him. We modern creatures, indeed, want nothing 
to fear, we want great men only as they serve us, as they make 
themselves one with us — no, they must not harm us or the 
least thing that lives ! And yet for Nietzsche to lose the fear 
of man, is also to lose the love of him, reverence for him, hope 
in him, yes, the wish for him — it is the way to satiety with 
the umana commedia, to nihilism. 108 

107 Beyond Good and Evil, § 225. 

108 Genealogy etc., I, § 12; cf. Werke, XIV, 66-7, § 132; Joyful Science, 
§§ 379, 382. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Concluded). TRUTH AS AN 
OBLIGATION. NET RESULTS OF THE CRITICISM 



As we have already seen, morality is conceived of by Nietzsche 
as a law (condition of life) of social groups, and, in the nature 
of the case, truth, i.e., truthful relations between members of 
the group, forms a part of it. There is no need to show in 
detail how habits of deception would prove destructive to the 
life of the group. But a further step may be taken, and is 
sometimes taken. Deception or dissimulation may be consid- 
ered wrong in itself. Moreover, since speaking the truth in- 
volves knowing it, this too may be considered obligatory — and 
obligatory not merely for reasons of social utility, but as an 
ideal in and for itself. Truth, in both meanings of the term, 
may come to seem absolute duty — and as matter of fact a fine 
and exacting conscience in these directions has arisen among 
civilized peoples. 

But Nietzsche asks, Is truth an unconditional obligation? 
First, is there an absolute obligation to speak or act the truth — 
never to dissimulate? It is necessary to distinguish between 
his personal attitude and conduct, and the answer he gives to 
the theoretic question. He himself was an example of the 
finest openness 1 — it might have been better for him in certain 
ways, had he concealed more and said less. He was apt, too, 
to judge others according to his own standard. For example, 
the change in his attitude to Wagner was due in no slight 
degree to the feeling that Wagner was something of an actor. 
He found Bismarck also guilty of lack of sincerity, though 
from a different motive (viz., negligence). He remarks that 
we should today condemn Plato for his sanction of pia fraus, 
and Kant for deriving his categorical imperative as he did, since 

1 Cf. Werke, XII, 217, § 457, which may sound boastful to those who 
do not know Nietzsche well. 

314 



TRUTH AS AN OBLIGATION 315 

faith certainly did not come to him in that way. 2 All the same 
he asks whether dissembling can be absolutely condemned. He 
has to admit that it has played a part in the evolution of man, 
and even in the evolution of morality. In his conduct primitive 
man more or less concealed his real self ; he, so to speak, clothed 
himself with the mores of his environment, and put his fearful 
side out of sight — his morality was a kind of protective device. 
Yet paradoxically enough the pretense might become reality in 
time; for if dissimulation is practised long enough, it becomes 
nature. This holds of the strong as well as the weak. "Good- 
ness has been most developed by long-continued dissimulation 
which sought to appear goodness: everywhere, where great 
power existed, the necessity of just this kind of dissimulation 
was perceived — it inspired assurance and confidence and multi- 
plied an hundredfold the actual amount of physical force. " 
"In the same way honor has been developed to great propor- 
tions by the demand for an appearance of honor and upright- 
ness — in hereditary aristocracies. ' ' Falsehood is then, if not 
the mother, the nurse of goodness. By a kind of biological 
dialectic dissimulation at last abolishes itself, and organs and 
instincts are the little expected fruits in the garden of hypoc- 
risy. 3 Evidently then truthfulness, as the opposite of playing 
a part, is not an absolute duty. Nietzsche even thinks that a 
philosopher, who will be at the same time a great teacher, must 
assume some of the rights of a teacher and hold back much; 
yet he must not be suspected of doing so, and a part of his 
mastery will consist in the success of his dissimulation. 4 

Second, is there a strict obligation to know the truth — never 
to be deceived ? Probably few men have had a finer intellectual 
conscience than Nietzsche — it is the key to much that was tragic 
in his intellectual history: he would not be taken in, whether 
as to the make-up of existence, as to religion, as to Wagner, as 
to Schopenhauer, as to morality, or as to truth itself. But this 
was his idiosyncrasy — did he regard the remorseless pursuit 

2 Werke, XIII, 340-1, § 847. Cf. Zarathustra's language to the wizard, 
" Thou actor ! thou false coiner ! Thou liar through and through ! " 
{Zarathastra, IV, v, §2). 

3 Dawn of Day, § 248; Werke, XI, 264-5, § 256; cf. XIII, 100-2; XIV, 
67, § 133. 

* Will to Power, § 980. 



316 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

and facing of reality as a duty for all? On the contrary, he 
came to question such a duty. I say "came," since for a time 
he seems to have regarded knowledge as an absolute good. "We 
should rather have humanity go to ruin than that knowledge 
should go back, ' ' he once wrote. 5 Indeed, he still honors the con- 
scientiousness of scientific investigators — "Were scrupulousness 
in knowing gone, what would become of science? " 6 The same 
fine sense for objective truth is at the bottom of his criticism 
of morality; he even says that skepticism of morality is a self- 
contradiction, since if the skeptic does not feel the authoritative 
nature of truth, he has no longer any reason for doubting and 
investigating in this realm. 7 Nor does he question that reason, 
the intellectual nature, is the final arbiter of truth 8 — he knows 
of no short-cuts to truth like "intuition," "will to believe," the 
"needs of the soul," etc. That a belief "makes happy" proves 
nothing — a truth may be dangerous and harmful; the ground- 
character of existence may be such that knowledge of it would 
be ruinous to most; it might be the measure of a mind's 
strength, how far it could stand truth or had to have it attenu- 
ated, veiled, sweetened, falsified. 9 Nietzsche's critical question- 
ing goes deeper than all this— it is as to the value of truth. 10 
We have been hearing much discussion of late as to the meaning 
of truth, but philosophers have not often asked, What is it 
worth? Most appear to take for granted that the possession 
of it is desirable, and Nietzsche is the first — or among the first — 
to disturb this naivete. Why, he asks, prefer truth to appear- 
ance? Why may not appearance be better? Why may not 
something we in part create be better than what is? Indeed, 
what reason is there for preferring, how can we speak of better 
at all in this connection, save as we have a standard of value — 
something which we do indisputably create? 

I may give one or two illustrations, which will perhaps 

6 Dawn of Day, § 429. The later attitude was, in part at least, a 
return to his earliest attitude (see ante, pp. 53-4, and the reference to 
fiat Veritas pereat vita in " Use and Harm of History," sect. 4 ) ; the 
almost limitless magnifying of knowledge belongs to his middle period. 

*Werke, XIII, 115, §256. 

7 Ibid., XIII, 115, §256; cf. Werke, XII, 84; XIII, 121, §§ 268-9. 

8 Dawn of Day, § 167. 

6 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 24 ; Beyond Good and Evil, § 39. Cf . the 
tone of the reference to intuition in Dawn of Day, § 550. 
10 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 24. 



TRUTH AS AN OBLIGATION 317 

make his meaning clearer. Suppose that reality had ultimately 
a tragic character, as Nietzsche early, and in a sense always, 
believed, that most men could not look on it and live, would it 
still and none the less be their duty to face it ? Would facing 
it and perishing be better than deception about it and life? 
It is of course an extreme case, but it may none the less serve 
as a test, and now as at the beginning Nietzsche puts life first. 
"We must be conscienceless as regards truth and error, so long 
as life hangs in the balance." 11 Again, the mass of men be- 
lieve in things, bodies, atoms, substances. They are illusory 
beliefs in his estimation, but none the less convenient and useful 
for the practical purposes of life. "If we take the strictest 
standpoint of morality, e.g., of honesty (Ehrlichkeit) , inter- 
course with things and all the articles of faith of our ordinary 
action (as, for instance, that there are bodies) are unmoral." 12 
But Nietzsche does not consider us obliged to throw away these 
articles of faith on this account. 13 

What he has in mind appears in still another connection. 
There is a tendency among scientific men today to eschew 
theory and hypothesis — to lay the emphasis on getting facts, ever 
more facts, even the petits faits. We see it not only in the 
natural sciences, but in history — the important thing is thought 
to be not to prove anything, not to judge, to approve or dis- 
approve, but to fix the facts, describe them, be a mirror of 
them. 14 Nietzsche regards it as a kind of asceticism. In a 
way indeed he honors it; he calls the painstaking, scrupulous, 
scientific men who deny the vagrant speculative instincts in 
which it is so easy to wander or wallow, the real heroes in the 
intellectual world of our day. 15 And yet he asks himself, Why, 
in the last analysis, this worship of the actual, this rigid sep- 
aration of everything subjective from it, this feeling that truth 
only is sacred and that thinking which is not devoted to getting 
it is labor thrown away ? In other days, when God was supposed 
to be behind all and in all, reality as a whole might be some- 

11 Werke, XII, 63, § 108. 

12 Ibid., XIV, 307, § 140. 

13 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §34; Will to Power, §616, and my 
general treatment of the subject in chap. xv. 

14 Cf. Genealogy etc., Ill, § 26. 
16 Ibid., Ill, §24. 



318 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

thing to be revered and the smallest particle of it better than 
any work of man's; but now, why this extreme respect? Nietz- 
sche sets it down as mere prejudice that truth is of more value 
than appearance (Schein) — he calls it the worst proven opinion 
in the world. He even asserts the contrary: "If there is in 
general anything to worship (anoeten), it is appearance that 
must be worshiped; it is falsehood and not truth that is 
divine ! " 16 Hence he sees science — so far as this means simply 
an accurate, painstaking account of the actual — in a new per- 
spective: no longer is it an intrinsic, self-evident good in his 
eyes. It needs a justification; it gives rise to a problem. This 
is, of course, from a standpoint beyond science: "the problem 
of science cannot be recognized (erkannt) on the ground 
(Boden) of science." 17 Nor can it answer the question it 
raises. To this end other things must be taken into account; 
there must be a larger, more ultimate view, a final standard 
of value — in short, some kind of philosophy, or "faith." Only 
as we have a supreme value, can we measure the worth of 
science, of actuality, or of anything else. To attempt, then, to 
put philosophy "on a strictly scientific basis," as is sometimes 
proposed, is really to invert the true order of things: it is, as 
Nietzsche half -humorously remarks, to make not only philosophy, 
but the truth stand on its head — a violation of all decency for 
beings (Fraaenzimmer) so respectable! 18 Nietzsche thinks that 
science, however unconsciously to itself, has rested on some kind 
of faith in the past. Even the ascetic form of science with 
which we are familiar today has its presupposition ("there is 
no presuppositionless science"), 19 namely, the idea that getting 
pure unadulterated facts is greatly important, that truth is 
more important than anything else — itself a broad, extra- 
scientific, and most discussable proposition. 20 And when this 

19 Beyond Good and Evil, § 34; Will to Power, § 1011. The qualifying 
" if " must be noticed. 

17 "Attempt at Self-criticism" (1886), §2, prefixed to later editions 
of The Birth of Tragedy. This early work also raised the problem of 
science, but chiefly from another angle, that of art. 

18 Genealogy etc., Ill, §24. I need not say that the words "phi- 
losophy " and " truth " are feminine in German. 

10 Ibid., Ill, §24; Joyful Science, §344. 

20 Nietzsche regards it as really a metaphysical proposition, since 
in the order of things we know an absolute will to truth may be indirectly 
a will to death ( see Joyful Science, § 344 ) . 



TRUTH AS AN OBLIGATION 319 

faith is gone or shaken, and the mere blind mechanical impulse 
of knowing lags (for it may be as blind and unreasoning as any 
other), what, in the absence of some other faith, will keep it 
going, what purpose shall inspire it? 21 Nietzsche thinks that 
there is more or less restlessness and inner discontent among 
scientific men today: " science as a means of benumbing oneself 
(Selbst-Betaubung) — do you know that?" 22 The supreme 
value which he himself postulates is life, ever stronger and 
more victorious life, life rising to the superhuman and divine. 
With such an ideal he has something with which to measure 
the worth of other things: now science may receive a direction, 
a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to be. 23 Truth is valuable 
so far as it helps in attaining the great end, is necessary to its 
attainment ; but that which gives it its value, fixes also the limits 
of its value, and to the extent that truth would militate against 
life, not to say undo it, its sacredness and authority cease. Life 
is beyond true and false, as it is beyond good and evil. 

Instances of the utility of truth and science it is needless 
to give — they are on every hand. But instances of the utility 
of error and illusion may be in order. I have just referred to 
the utility of the error which most men make about the physical 
world. Nietzsche also recognizes — as we have seen — the bene- 
ficial role which illusions of free-will and responsibility have 
played in the past. 24 a In social life and intercourse now there 
may be useful illusions. There is no duty to see things too 
clearly, too exactly. It was one of Zarathustra 's prudences to 
be to some extent blind in face of men, to allow himself to be 
deceived by them. 25 Nietzsche outgrew, but did not regret his 
illusions about Wagner — in certain years, he remarks, we have 
the right to see things and men falsely, to have magnifying 
glasses to give us hope. 26 There is a value in illusions like those 
of eternal love, eternal revenge, eternal mourning — the feelings 
become ennobled in this way, even if the event proves that the 

21 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 25. 

22 Ibid., Ill, §23. Pascal had thrown out a similar suggestion (see 
the reference in " David Strauss etc.," sect. 8 ) . 

23 Ibid., § 24. 

24 Human, etc., §40 (cf. §33); Werke, XIII, 204, §458; The Wan- 
derer etc., § 350. 

25 Zarathustra, II, xxi. 

26 Werke, XIV, 375, §254; cf. 380, §264. 



320 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

vows cannot be kept. 27 Making absolute knowledge a duty is a 
madness of the period of virtue; we must hallow falsehood, 
illusion, faith — life would be in peril if we did not. 28 Nietzsche 
had known himself the perilousness of the pursuit of truth. 
''For so dangerously does it stand with us today: all that we 
loved when we were young has deceived us. Our last love — that 
which makes us confess this now, our love of truth — let us see 
that also this love does not deceive us !" a That is (as I under- 
stand him), intellectual honesty itself, the finest spiritualization 
of morality, is dangerous — only the few are equal to all the 
risks it involves. b 

So torn was Nietzsche by contrary instincts, one to life, the 
other to truth at any cost, that he undertook, as we have seen, 
the desperate expedient of changing the meaning of truth, so 
that it should signify hereafter life-preserving and upbuilding 
ideas — but unavailingly. 30 Indeed, he was led to language 
stranger still. There was an order of assassins in the Orient 
whom the Crusaders came upon, who — or rather whose superiors 
— had for their secret motto, "Nothing is true, everything is 
permitted." The words struck Nietzsche by their daring and 
subtle suggestiveness. He quotes the motto more than once and 
with semi-approval 31 — and has scandalized many. c On the face 
of it, it means complete license, intellectual and moral. How 
can he, we ask, take it up and make it in a way his own? Is 
he turning his back on all his past? He does indeed once say, 
"We have libertinage of the mind in all innocence/' but this is 
in characterizing Europeans of the nineteenth century, and the 
"we" is not necessarily personal; 32 if it is taken personally, it 
is out of harmony with other references to intellectual libertin- 
ism and his ever repeated emphasis on intellectual scrupulous- 
ness. 33 We really get at his meaning in using the motto (and 
also in the remark about "libertinage of the mind," in case 

27 Dawn of Day, § 27. 

28 Werke, XIII, 124, §280; cf. preface, §4, to Joyful Science. 
26 Werke (pocket ed.), VIII, 500, §27. 

80 See ante, p. 187. 

81 Zarathustra, IV, ix (it is the " shadow " here who speaks) ; Geneal- 
ogy etc., Ill, §24; Werke, XIII, 361, §888. 

82 Will to Power, § 120. 

33 Cf. Ibid., §§42, 43, and the way in which "strict conscience for 
what is true and actual " is spoken of in Dawn of Day, § 270. 



TRUTH AS AN OBLIGATION 321 

that has to be taken personally), when we notice the connection 
in which its principal use is made, and follow the highly refined 
discussion of the value and significance of truth in which it 
plays a part — a discussion which I have just inadequately sum- 
marized {Genealogy etc., Ill, §24). In an earlier chapter 
[XV] we observed the extent of his skepticism as to our pos- 
session of truth, and now we see his skepticism as to its value. 
He could offer an hypothesis only as to the nature of reality, 
and now he is aware that any kind of a judgment of value pre- 
supposes some standard which is created by the mind. Hy- 
potheses, mental constructions or creations are then all he has 
— and he knows that his right to have them may be questioned 
by the sort of asceticism that goes by the name of science today. 
If we bear all this in mind — if we remember that to his mind 
' ' truth " is not strictly true, but provisional, shifting, and that 
instead of an antithetical true and false, there are only grades 
of likelihood, lighter and darker shadings, different valeurs (to 
borrow the language of painters), 34 if we remember also that a 
standard of value is not something independently existing, but 
a projection of the mind and that he wanted to be free to 
project his standard, we may perhaps understand (if we do not 
justify) how in a kind of bravado, reckless of whether he was 
understood or not, he took up the revolting assassin-motto 
and made it in a sense his own. Nietzsche proposed life, 
ascending and victorious life, as the goal and measure of things ; 
he aspired to be one of those philosophers who are at the same 
time commanders and lawgivers, saying "so should things be," 
who determine a whither and a reason for man, 35 and the goal 
and law he proposed were more or less different from those that 
have been credited in the past, particularly in the Christian 
past ; indeed, the Christian world confronted him with the view 
that the law for man existed already, laid down by God him- 
self, and it was a law enjoining certain things, like benevolence 
and pity, which, however good and necessary within limits, cut 
athwart advancing life, when taken absolutely, as they were by 
Christianity. And so he turned about and said, No, this is not 
God's law, nor anybody's save those who posit it; there is no 

34 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 34. 

85 Cf. ibid., §211; Will to Power, §422. 



322 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

objective reality or truth in this realm and I am free to propose 
my law. " Nothing is true, everything is permitted" — it is his 
charter of liberty for the new valuations. 36 Those who take 
the words out of their connection, and interpret them as a 
sanction for thinking and acting in general as one likes, do 
violence to the whole character and history of the man. d 

With these remarks on his views of truth, I bring the con- 
sideration of the criticism of morality to an end. 



Before turning, however, to his constructive work in this 
realm, it may be well to sum up the main results of the criticism. 
Some have the idea that he rejected morality in toto, and it must 
be admitted that language he sometimes uses would, taken 
literally, justify such a conclusion. He speaks of the self- 
destruction of morality, 37 of his campaign against morality, 38 
of his boring, undermining work in this direction. 39 He declares 
that it should no more be disgraceful to depart from morality. 40 
' ' Morality is annihilated : exhibit the fact. There remains ' I 
will. ' " 41 One writer speaks of him as bent on destroying moral- 
ity root and branch, challenging not merely this or that idea 
of the current code, but wishing to annihilate the very concep- 
tion of the code. 42 

But few thinkers may less safely be judged by single utter- 
ances than Nietzsche. One or two things must be borne in mind 
if ,we wish to get at his real meaning. First, by morality he 
understands the historical phenomenon going by that term, 
namely a social, socially imposed, rule of life. That an indi- 
vidual may have a rule of life of his own making and that this 
may be called morality, he does not question, but it is not the 

36 The motives for the renunciation of absolute morality are indi- 
cated plainly in Werke, XIV, 87, § 174; cf. 419-20, §303. 

87 Preface, §4, to Dawn of Day; Werke, XII, 84, §165; Genealogy 
etc., Ill, § 27. 

38 Ecce Homo, III, iv, § 1. 

39 Preface, §§ 1, 2, to Dawn of Day. 

40 Dawn of Day, § 164. 

41 Werke, XIII, 363, §896; cf. Joyful Science, §107; Werke (pocket 
ed.), VII, 482, §13; preface, §6, to Genealogy etc. 

* 2 A. R. Orage, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dionysian Spirit of the Age, 
p. 46. Even W. Weigand states it broadly as Nietzsche's view that 
morality has corrupted humanity (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein psychologischer 
Versuch, p. 101). 



NET RESULTS OF THE CRITICISM 323 

kind of morality which he criticises. Second, in his criticism 
he often has in mind not so much actual moral codes as the 
theory of morality, more particularly the religious or absolutist 
theory, as it has developed especially under Christian influence, 
and still finds an echo in the philosophies of Kant and Schopen- 
hauer. The word he uses in the passages just cited, for instance, 
is not " Sittlichkeit" or "Moralitat," but "die Moral," which is 
somewhat like "morals" or "moral philosophy" with us — and 
the moral philosophy he has in mind is generally the Christian, 
or at least Kantian or Schopenhauerian. This type of moral 
philosophy is not so common in our secular and positivist days 
as it was once — and perhaps if Nietzsche had lived in England 
or America, where ethics is usually quite divorced from the- 
ology and metaphysics, he would have written differently. The 
older view is expressed by one who was perhaps the last great 
Englishman to maintain the Christian tradition, John Henry 
Newman, when he refers to conscience as a "messenger from 
Him, who, in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil," 
as "the aboriginal vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, 
a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and 
anathemas"; 43 and also by the late Father Tyrrell, when he 
says, "It is from the Sinai of conscience (individual and col- 
lective) that He thunders forth His commandments and judg- 
ments. " M In a modified form it is perpetuated by Kant and 
Schopenhauer, both of whom, though in differing ways, con- 
ceived of morality as bringing man into connection with a super- 
sensible, metaphysical world. It is this morality of the grand 
order which Nietzsche criticises, rather than the modest, utili- 
tarian morality, little more than a working program, which is 
most in evidence among scholars today. He speaks, for instance, 
of a possible unmoral humanity in the future, the connection 
showing that he means one aware that "there is no eternal moral 
law. ' ' 45 The morality he considers is something that has been 
the object not only of honor, but of worship ; ^ it is an assur- 

43 A Letter to his Grace the Duke of Norfolk, on occasion of Mr. 
Gladstone's Recent Expostulation (1875), §5; see also interesting later 
paragraphs developing this view, and proving that it is the historic view 
of the church. 

44 1 borrow this passage from Stanton Coit's Social ^Yorship, p. 50. 

46 Werke, XII, 167, § 342. 

*<Ecce Homo, III, iv, § 1. 



324 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

ance "on which we philosophers have been wont to build for 
now two thousand years as upon the surest foundation"; 47 it 
is something which gives to every man an infinite worth, a meta- 
physical worth, and ranges him in a different order from this 
earthly one; 48 it is "die Moral im alten Sinne," covering all 
practices and mores on which the power of Gods, priests, and 
saviours rests, including ideas of free-will, sin, guilt, of an 
offended deity, of calamity as punishment, of a way of salva- 
tion, of conscience as supernatural — the whole of what he calls 
"the moral interpretation of existence," and none at bottom 
made it more assuredly than Schopenhauer. 49 The historical 
(as opposed to Nietzsche's imaginary) Zarathustra shared in it 
essentially, turning morality as he did into something meta- 
physical, making it a force, a cause, an end in itself, and view- 
ing the contest between good and evil as the driving wheel in 
the general machinery of things. 50 Such is the morality which 
Nietzsche thought his .criticism undermined — at least it is 
oftenest what he has in mind. 

To put the results somewhat in order (and stating them 
always as he conceives them), the criticism undermines, first, 
the faith that morality brings one in any special sense into 
contact with ultimate reality. Kee had said that the moral man 
stands no nearer the intelligible (metaphysical) world than the 
physical man does, and Nietzsche follows him. 51 To put morality 
into the nature of things, as philosophers in common with peo- 
ples have done, to give the world a moral significance has as 
much validity and no more than ascribing a male or female 
gender to the sun. 52 Kindness, sympathy exist and have a 
meaning in social formations — they serve and help maintain 
a whole in conflict with other wholes, but in the total economy 
of the world, where there can be no passing away or loss, they 
are a superfluous principle. 53 The whole circle of ethical con- 
ceptions can be explained without going out of the realm of 
human relations. The idea of a moral order, the construing of 

47 Preface, § 2, to Dawn of Day. 

48 Will to Power, § 55. 

49 See practically the whole first book of Dawn of Day. 

50 Ecce Homo, IV, § 3. 

51 Human, etc., § 37. 

"Werke, XII, 130-1, §251; Dawn of Day, §3. 
53 Werke, XIV, 323. 



NET RESULTS OF THE CRITICISM 325 

the fortunes of men and nations as rewards and punishments, is 
a palpable anthropomorphism — and not an altogether noble one. 
Further, the criticism undermines the faith that morality 
is the thing of supreme moment in life. 54 It is but a means, 
and has been made an end. It is a means, too, to a special type 
of life, namely the social or gregarious, and there are other 
and higher types. Great individuals standing more or less 
apart are superior to the "social man," and the purely moral 
instinct is to suspect, look askance at them; particularly is this 
so with Christian morality, which is social morality par ex- 
cellence. The flock says, Let them serve us, make themselves 
one of us, if they are to be good: its type of goodness is the 
type, the only type. Nietzsche cannot restrain his irony. Why, 
he asks, should people with these little gregarious virtues im- 
agine that they have pre-eminence on earth and in heaven — 
"eternal life" being especially for them? Even if an individual 
brings these virtues to perfection, he is none the less a dear, 
little absurd sheep — provided always that he does not burst 
with vanity, and scandalize by assuming the airs of a judge. 55 
Again, "What is it that I protest against? That one should 
take this little peaceful mediocrity, this equilibrium of a soul 
that knows not the great impulsions arising from great heapings 
up of force, for something high, possibly even as the measure 
of man. " B In a similar spirit he makes reflections on the 
morality that becomes popular, on the reverence for morality 
that hinders progress in morality. 57 To him exclusive emphasis 
on (gregarious) morality is a kind of poison — he invents a 
chemical name for it, moralin. 58 The social virtues take man a 
certain way, they are indispensable to the existence of social 
groups, but, when made absolute, they go against the develop- 
ment of a higher, stronger type — they tend to fix man's form, 
although it has been a distinction of the human animal hitherto 
that he was without a fixed and final form. 59 Moreover, the 

64 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 1006, 1020. 
"Ibid., §203; cf. §252. 
sa IUd., §249. 

67 Joyful Science, § 292; Dawn of Day, § 19. 

68 The word appears in compounds, " moralinsauer " ("The Case of 
Wagner," § 3 ) " moralinfrei " ( Will to Power, § 740 ; The Antichristian, 
§ 2 ) , and, I think by itself, though I cannot now give an instance. 

69 Werlce, XIV, 66-7, § 132. 



326 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

propitious time for the blossoming of great individuals may be 
limited, and an absolute dominancy of morality may mean the 
defeat of the higher possibilities. 60 Morality a danger! — this is 
one of Nietzsche's points of view. The language is not so 
startling as it sounds — sometimes old-time religious teachers 
have used it, though from another point of view; and even in 
Nietzsche's mouth it is not without a touch of religious mean- 
ing, since his thought is that morality covers only the lower 
ranges of man's life and that there are higher! With questions 
of morality and immorality, we do not even touch, he holds, the 
higher value of man, which is altogether independent of social 
utility — a man may have it, though there is no one to whom he 
can be useful; indeed, one may be injurious to others and yet 
have it. "A man with a taste of his own, shut and hidden by 
his solitude, incommunicable, uncommunicative — an incalcula- 
ble man, hence a man of a higher, in any case a different species : 
how are you going to measure him, since you cannot know, 
cannot compare him?" Moral preoccupation then puts one low 
in the order of rank, since it shows that one lacks the instinct 
for separate right, the a parte, the sense of freedom of creative 
natures, of "children of God" (or the Devil). 61 

To mention one or two details, the criticism undermines the 
ordinary idea of conscience. Conscience is a social product, 
and may vary as social standards vary. Yes, as a late result 
of social evolution, there may be an individual conscience against 
sqcial standards. But conscience of itself is no standard at all. 
The notion is also undermined that evil is to be stamped out in 
the world, that only the good has a rightful place there. The 
total necessities of the world, i.e., of progress in it, require good 
and evil (understanding by "good" the friendly, preservative 
impulses, and by "evil" the destructive ones). The criticism 
still further undermines the idea that moral acts are of a pe- 
culiar kind, i.e., free and unegoistic. There is an absolute 
homogeneity in all happening; there are no moral phenomena, 
but only a moral interpretation of phenomena. As the per- 
spective, the interests differ, so do the moralities. 62 A curious 

60 So I interpret the close of § 198, Werke, XI, 240. 

61 Will to Power, §§877-9; Werke, XI, 248-50. 

82 From this point of view Nietzsche speaks of morality as sign- 



NET RESULTS OF THE CRITICISM 327 

incident of the criticism is the discovery that the actual empire 
of virtue is not always secured by virtuous means — that is, that 
false assumption, defamation, and deception contribute to the 
result. 63 A virtue comes to power, Nietzsche observes, much as 
a political party does, by misrepresenting, casting suspicion 
upon, undermining the opposition, i.e., contrasted virtues al- 
ready in power; it gives them other names [one thinks of how 
missionary religions have sometimes turned the native Gods of 
a country into devils], systematically persecutes and derides 
them. 64 An instance is the way in which Christian ideals 
managed to triumph over the ancient ideals. 65 

in 

What is left of morality, after the criticism? In speaking 
once of modern tendencies generally, Nietzsche observes that 
traditional morality suffers, but not necessarily single virtues, 
like self-control and justice — for freedom may spontaneously 
lead to them and hold them useful. 66 He by no means denies 
that many actions called unmoral are to be avoided and striven 
against, and that many called moral are to be done and fur- 
thered — but for other reasons than heretofore. 67 Utilitarians, 
aestheticians, friends of knowledge, and idealists may make the 
same demands which morality makes, so that its self-destruction 
need not practically change matters. 68 He once attempts a kind 
of balancing of morality: he finds it harmful in certain ways, 
useful in others. It is harmful, for instance, in hindering the 
enjoyment of life, and thankfulness to life; in hindering the 
beautifying and ennobling of life; in hindering the knowledge 
of life, and also the unfolding of life, i.e., so far as it seeks to 
set the highest forms of life at variance with themselves. But, 
on the other hand, it is useful as a preservative principle of 
social wholes and a means of restraining individual members — 

language, symptomatology, and so far invaluable for the understanding of 
man ( Twilight etc., vii, § 1 ) . 

63 Will to Power, §§ 266, 305; cf. Dawn of Day, § 97. 

"Will to Power, §311; cf. 310. 

85 Cf. a passage like Werke, XII, 171, § 354. 

69 Ibid., XIII, 181-2, § 413. 

87 Dawn of Day, § 103. 

68 Werke, XII, 83-5. Cf. Kurt Breysig's remarks, Jahrbuch fur Gesetz- 
gebung, xx (1896), pp. 10, 11. 



328 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

here useful for the "instrument"; as a preservative principle 
against the peril of the passions — here useful for the "aver- 
age"; as a preservative principle against the life-destroying 
effects of deep want and misery — here useful for the "suffer- 
ing"; as a counter-principle against fearful explosion on the 
part of the powerful — here useful for the "humble." 69 He 
notes an experience like this: "I said to myself today, '0 that 
is a good man ' ! I had a feeling as if I had in my hand a 
beautiful, ripe, perfect apple with smooth skin: a feeling of 
tenderness, as of being drawn to him; a feeling of security, as 
if I might repose near him as under a tree ; a feeling of rever- 
ence, as if I were in presence of an object to be touched only 
with the purest hands; a feeling of being satisfied, as if at one 
stroke I were released from discontent. That is, to the moral 
judgment 'good,' there corresponded a state in me arising as 
I thought of a certain man. It is the same as when I call a 
stone 'hard.'" 70 Surely one who could speak in this way 
cannot be taxed with insensibility to goodness. It is true that 
after a similar picture in another place, he asks, "Why should 
this undangerous man who affects us pleasantly, be of more 
worth to us than a dangerous, impenetrable, unreckonable man 
who forces us to be on our guard ? Our pleasant feeling proves 
nothing ' ' n — but the sensibility to goodness, the sense of its 
beauty, is none the less real. There is the same implication of 
a due valuation of contrasted things in another remark: "I do 
not wish to undervalue the amiable virtues; but greatness of 
soul is not compatible with them. Also in the fine arts, the 
great style excludes the pleasing. ' ' 72 The amiable virtues are 
not the highest, but they have their place. So with another 
remark: "Beyond good and evil [this of himself and his kind,] 
— but [in the group] we demand the unconditional holding 
sacred of group-morality [the supreme categories of which are 
"good and evil"]. 73 That is, "good and evil," though not the 
highest categories, are valid, unconditionally valid, in large 

69 Will to Power, § 266. 

70 Werke, XIII, 181-2, § 413. 

71 Ibid., XIV, 79, § 155. 

72 Will to Power, § 1040. 

73 Ibid., §132. Cf. §287 ("the point of view— Sinn^-of the group 
shall rule in the group, but not beyond " ) . 



NET RESULTS OF THE CRITICISM 329 

realms of human life. So lie calls it well to take " right,'* 
" wrong," etc., in a definite, narrow, " bourgeois " sense, as in 
the saying "do right and fear no one": that is, to do one's duty 
according to the rough, definite scheme, by following which a 
community maintains itself — and he charges us not to think 
lightly of what two thousand years of moral training have bred 
in our mind ! 7i Although morality is now oppressive, i.e., to 
those of his type, he expresses the "deepest gratitude for the 
service it has hitherto rendered"; it has itself bred the force 
that now drives us to venture on the untried 75 — indeed, we 
need very much morality to be immoral in this fine way. 76 
That Nietzsche means to preserve something of the subtle spirit 
of the old morality, we shall see still more clearly in the ensuing 
chapters. 

Once we have a list of what he deems the four principal 
virtues — they are courage, insight, sympathy, solitude. Other 
formulations are: honesty, courage, generosity, courtesy; hon- 
esty, courage, justice, love. 77 I have already cited what he says 
of a "broken word." 78 There are actions we cannot permit to 
ourselves, he declares, even as means to the highest ends, e.g., 
betraying a friend; better perish and hope that there will be 
more favorable conditions for accomplishing the ends. 79 He 
comments on the shameless readiness of the ancient Greek no- 
bles to break their word. 80 Though he sees the place of destruc- 
tion, malice and hatred in the world, as well as of conservation 
and love, the highest thing to him is love — at least the highest 
love, the ' ' great love " ; it is this indeed that is the final sanction 
of war and inequality and all the successive stages and bridges 
of advancing life. 81 Justice stands out the higher to him as it 
is differentiated from revenge. At times he may seem to justify 

74 Ibid., § 267. Cf. the relative justification of the morality of the 
old Greek cities, as against the abstractions, universalizations, of Socrates 
and Plato, ibid., §§ 428-9. 

70 Ibid., §§ 404-5. Cf. as to the indispensableness of morality in man's 
early contest with nature and wild animals, § 403. 

79 Ibid., §273. 

77 Beyond Good and Evil, §284; Dawn of Day, §556; Werke, XIV, 
312. 

78 See ante, p. 285, footnote 35. 

79 Werke, XIII, 196-7, § 433. 
60 Daicn of Day, § 199; cf. § 165. 

81 Zarathustra, II, vii; cf. Ill, vii (Zarathustra takes to task one 
who despises great cities and everything in them, saying that one's con- 



330 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

injustice, but if we notice carefully, we find that it is injury he 
has in mind, 82 injury which is so often called injustice, but is 
only really unjust when committed against a promise or under- 
standing. I do not remember a single case in which he defends 
injustice proper. 83 Over against the fact that so many great 
men have been unjust, he says, "let us be just" and perhaps 
admit that the great were as just as their insight, their time, 
their education, their opponents permitted — either this, or else 
that they were not great. 846 It is also a very high, if not an 
absolute place, which Nietzsche gives to honesty with oneself — 
something which does not appear, he remarks, among the 
Socratic or the Christian virtues. He honors it in the scholar ; 
genius itself does not make up for the lack of it. 85 It even has 
a field for exercise in sense-perceptions ; e.g., "it is easier for our 
eye on a given stimulus to produce an image that has often 
been produced before, than to hold fast what is distinctive 
and new in the impression: the latter requires more force, 
more ' morality/ ' ' 86 With this and similar things in mind 
he goes so far as to say that there are no other than moral 
experiences, intellectuality itself being an outcome of moral 
qualities. 87 Is there not, he asks, a moral way and an immoral 
way of making a judgment — even in saying "so and so is 
right"? 88 Learning to distinguish more sharply what is real 
in others, in ourselves, and in nature, is a part of progress in 
morals. 89 Indeed, as if with a half-rueful memory of all he 
had had to part with, he speaks of honesty as the sole 
virtue which survives to him. 90 "What does it mean, then, to 
be upright in intellectual things ? To be on one 's guard against 
one's heart, to despise 'beautiful feelings/ to make a matter of 
conscience of every yes and no." 91 The general idea of duty 

tempt should spring from love and not be the croaking of a frog in the 
swamp ) . 

82 Cf. Joyful Science, §267; Beyond Oood and Evil, §258; Will to 
Power, §§ 352, 965, 968. 

83 Unless WerJce, XI, 250, §218, is so construed. 

84 Werke, XII, 135-6, § 262. 

86 Dawn of Day, § 456; Joyful Science, § 366. 
88 Beyond Oood and Evil, § 192. 

87 Joyful Science, § 114; Beyond Oood and Evil, § 219. 

88 Joyful Science, § 335. 

89 Werke, XII, 129, § 249. 

90 Beyond Good and Evil, § 227. 
01 The Antichristian, § 50. 



NET RESULTS OF THE CRITICISM 331 

also remains. Many " duties" are questioned, and the old 
absolutist conception of duty disappears — it must be with this 
absolutist understanding of the word that he says he had never 
met a man of parts who was not ready to admit that he had 
lost the sense of duty or had never possessed it. 92 All the same, 
the superior man, he tells us, ranks his privileges and the 
exercise of them among his "duties," and if one of this type 
handles average men with tenderer fingers than he does him- 
self and those like him, it is not mere politeness of the heart — 
"it is simply his duty." 93 As already noted, even his "im- 
moralists" are "men of duty." 94 Nietzsche's thought is evi- 
dently that men may place duties on themselves, that will in 
man as well as in God, in the individual as well as in society, 
may generate duty — but of this more hereafter. Even piety 
does not altogether disappear. A man of the old religious type 
says to Zarathustra, "Thou art more pious than thou thinkest 
with such unbelief! Some God converted thee to thy godless- 
ness. Is it not your piety itself that no longer allows you to 
believe in a God?" 95 And it is always, I may add, with rever- 
ence that Nietzsche uses the word "divine." 96 We are then 
not unprepared for something more than negation in Nietz- 
sche's total attitude to morality. 

92 Werke, XIV, 209, § 419. 

83 Beyond Good and Evil, §272; The Antichristian, §57. 

94 Beyond Good and Evil, § 226. 

96 Zarathustra, IV, vi. 

88 Cf. Ibid., II, vii; III, iv; Will to Power, §§304, 685. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

MORAL CONSTRUCTION. THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY 

NIETZSCHE x 



In passing to Nietzsche's construction in morality I may say 
at the outset that it is a mistake to suppose that he was by 
temperament and instinct a radical — traces of a certain natural 
conservatism are plainly visible in his writings. He mentions 
with pride that he came of a line of Protestant pastors, 2 and 
it is evident that it was intellectual necessity more than any- 
thing else that led to his departure from the ancient ways, and 
that even in his mental revolutions he kept something of the 
old spirit. He once speaks of conscientiousness in small things, 
the self-control of the religious man, as a preparatory school 
for the scientific character. 3 He says in so many words, "We 
will be heirs of all the morality that has gone before and not 
start de novo. Our whole procedure is only morality turning 
against its previous form." 4 If he speaks of an overcoming 
of morality, it is a self-overcoming, 5 i.e., not by a foreign and 
hostile party. "Why do I love free thinking? As the last 
consequence of previous morality" — and he goes on to indicate 
how it comes from justice, courage, honesty, loving disposition 
to all. 6 The demand for a wherefore, a critique of morality, is 
a form of morality, the most sublimated kind of it. 7 In reflect- 
ing over the struggles and changes he had gone through, he 
says, "at last I discovered in the whole process living morality, 
driving force — I had only imagined that I was beyond good and 

1 The substance of this and the following chapters appeared in The 
International Journal of Ethics, January and April, 1915. 

2 Werke, XIV, 358, § 223. 

3 Will to Power, § 469. 

4 Werke, XIII, 125, § 282; cf. Dolson on this point, op. cit., p. 63. 

5 Beyond Good and Evil, § 32. 
8 Werke, XIII, 124, § 281. 

7 Will to Power, §§ 399, 404. 

332 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 333 

evil" 8 (here using the latter phrase broadly), or, as he puts it 
in paradoxical form, "I had to dissolve (aufheben) morality, 
in order to put my moral will through. ' ' 9 

Moreover, criticism had revealed to him the fact of varying 
types of morality, and the question arose, might there not be 
still other and perhaps higher types ? 10 Of course, this pre- 
supposes a generic idea of morality, more or less separable from 
special instances. Nietzsche does not make a formal definition, 
but we gather from a variety of direct or incidental references 
what he thought was involved. In the generic sense, a morality 
is a set of valuations resting on supposed conditions of exist- 
ence of some kind. 11 Further, it is something regulating, com- 
manding, so that it introduces order into life : some things may 
be done, others may not be done — discipline, strictness hence 
arising. 12 On the subjective side, its root is reverence, the only 
properly moral motive. 13 As action, it is free (not in the inde- 
terminist sense, but in the sense of voluntary, not forced). 14 
Nietzsche sometimes criticises ideals, but when he does so, he 
has in mind mere abstract desirabilities, fancy pictures unre- 
lated to reality. 15 A morality, as he understands the term, 
must be a really possible ideal of real beings — something then 
related to the earth and actual men. 16 Further, although he 
objects to praising and blaming with their ordinary implica- 
tions of responsibility and free-will, he none the less recognizes 
things to honor and things to despise, 17 things to further and 
things to oppose 18 — so that a basis for moral discriminations 

8 Werke, XIV, 312, § 144. 

9 Ibid., XIII, 176, §404; cf. XIV, 351-2, §212; 308-9, §141. 

10 Beyond Good and Evil, §202. 

11 Conditions for passing from one form of existence into another 
included (cf. Werke, XIV, 313, § 144; XIII, 139, § 322). As to the special 
conditions of existence of the philosopher, see Genealogy etc., Ill, § 8. 

12 Werke, XIII, 216, § 510; Will to Power, § 966 (cf. the use of "ex- 
treme immorality" in §246) ; ibid., §§ 914, 981; Werke, XI, 239, § 197. 

13 So only can I interpret Daivn of Day, § 97; cf. Joyful Science, § 335; 
Werke, XIII, 150, §355; 190, §421. 

14 Werke, XIII, 124, § 280. 

15 Will to Power, §§330, 709; Twilight etc., ix, §32. 

16 Cf. Zarathustra, I, iii; also IV, xviii, §2 ("We have no desire to 
go into the kingdom of heaven, we are men and desire a kingdom of the 
earth " ) . 

17 Numberless citations might be given; even praising and blaming 
are sometimes viewed from another angle and. to this extent justified (see 
Werke, XIII, 197-8, §435). 

18 Cf. Dawn of Day, § 103; Genealogy etc., I, § 17. 



334 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

still remains. All this in general. And now as to the special 
type of morality which he proposes. 

ii 

It is conceivable, he says, that the existence of man should 
be so precarious on the earth, that any rules and any illusions 
would be justified by which he was kept alive — the strictest dis- 
cipline might be necessary. In this way primitive types of 
morality were justified, even if they covered much that seems 
to us superfluous or absurd — man could live only in and by 
society, and the social strait-jacket was imperative. Now, 
however, human existence has become relatively secure. Man 
abounds, perhaps superabounds. While under the early situa- 
tion morality was not a matter of choice, now a certain freedom 
arises: we can more or less choose our ends, aiming in this or 
that direction as our imagination or taste or reason dictates. 19 

It is under such a presupposition that Nietzsche proposes 
his moral aim. The problem appears to him in its most general 
form like this: Here within what we call humanity is an im- 
mense mass of force, accumulated and kept from wasting and 
self-destruction in no small measure by the influence of past 
morality — what shall be done with it, what impress shall be 
put upon it, what direction shall it take 1 Shall we let it drift ? 
Shall our policy in relation to it be laisser aller, laisser passer — 
trusting to Providence or to destiny? Nietzsche thinks that 
confidences like these have an uncertain foundation and that 
humanity has already drifted too long. "We should rather, he 
urges, seek to put an end to the horrible rule of folly and 
chance, hitherto called " history, " for things do go to a fearful 
extent by accident in this world, and the call for foresight, for 
reason, is great. 20 "The immense amount of accident, contra- 
diction, disharmony, stupidity, in the present human world 
points to the future"; this is its "field of labor, where it can 
create, organize, and harmonize." 21 A goal does not exist now, 
the ideals of men contradict one another; they arose in far 

19 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 260-1, 953. 

20 Beyond Good and Evil, §203; cf. Zarathustra, I, iii; Werke, XIV, 
337, § 186; cf. 335, §178. 

21 Werke, XIII, 362-3, §895; cf. Zarathustra, I, xxii, §2; II, xx; 
III, xii, §3; IV, xvi, §2. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 335 

narrower relations and were born of numberless errors. 22 
Moreover, it is an aim for the totality of humanity that is 
wanted; it is humanity as a whole that needs to be organized. 
What is the ideal that may make an aim, a goal, and a principle 
of organization ? 2 s 

Before giving Nietzsche's actual answer to this question, 
a word may perhaps properly be said as to the general logic 
of his procedure. In the first place, he remembers that it is an 
interregnum in which we live — hence we cannot be dogmatic, 
can only propose: "we are experiments, we wish to be." 24 He 
is simply convinced in general that the future (future possi- 
bilities) must regulate our valuations — that we cannot seek the 
laws of our actions behind us. 25 Secondly, the end or goal is 
not given to us. There is no absolute command, saying "so and 
so thou must choose, ' ' there is none from metaphysics and there 
is none from science: science indicates the flow of things, but 
not the goal. 26 Once with an ideal, science may tell us how to 
reach it; science also gives us presuppositions (the general na- 
ture of existence) with which an ideal must correspond — but it 
does not fix the ideal itself. 27 Herbert Spencer's picture of 
the future, for instance, is not a scientific necessity, it simply 
indicates a wish born of present ideals. 28 Indeed, thirdly, this 
realm of ends is a field where the ordinary categories of true 
and false do not apply. In the final analysis, an end or goal 
or ideal is not a reality, an object to which thought must con- 
form, but a something projected by the mind and set (made 
objective) by the will. We make ends, goals, ideals, they are 
a proof of our creative power. When we have set them, there 
are real conditions of attaining them, and these we do not 
make ; we have to discover them, here we are bound, and science 

22 Werke, XIV, 335, § 178. 

23 Cf. Will to Power, § 880 (a substitute for morality through will to 
our end, and hence to the necessary means ) . 

24 Dawn of Day, § 453; cf. § 164. Nietzsche regards past moralities as 
really built on hypothesis more or less; but as man's mind was too weak 
and unsure of itself to take an hypothesis as such and at the same time 
make it regulative, faith (Glaube) was necessary (Werke, XIII, 139, 
§321). 

26 Will to Power, § 1000; cf. Werke, XIII, 342, § 984. 

29 Werke, XIV, 320, § 155; cf. Will to Power, § 583; Werke, XII, 357, 
§672. 

27 Dawn of Day, §453; Werke, XII, 357, §672. 

28 Werke, XIII, 80, § 155. 



336 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

is supreme. But the ends do not exist save as we posit them: 
they are beyond questions of true and false. 29 Here the extraor- 
dinary assassin-motto holds: "Nothing is true, everything is 
permitted." 30 But, fourthly, we do not need to have an end 
given us (by God or nature) ; we have creative power and can 
make one ourselves. I say ' ' can, ' ' for it is at last a question of 
strength; perhaps some cannot. Zarathustra draws a picture 
of the history of man's mind; there are three stages — it is in 
turn a camel, a lion, and a child. The camel carries, bears what 
is heavy, dutifully submits, originates nothing, endures all 
things. The lion wants freedom, gets it, does away with all 
masters, still is not able to create. The child, however, can; 
it arises in innocence and oblivion of the past, is a new begin- 
ning, a first motion, a wheel turning of its own energy; the 
child plays, and is equal to the play of creation. The camel 
represents the old morality, useful, but limited in power; the 
lion the critical, destructive spirit, also useful, but limited in 
strength; the child positive creation. Man's mind in its historic 
course passes through these stages; and now it is the age of 
the child. 31 Fifthly, as to how the mind shall create, what it 
shall produce, there is in the nature of the case no outside law. 
It is a matter of choice, of will absolutely, not of will as opposed 
to reason, for reason makes no deliverances on a supreme ques- 
tion like this [reason is the faculty of reasomwp, and proceeds 
from a starting-point which it presupposes, i.e., finds, but does 
nojt create]. In a moral aim, one puts forth one's supreme choice 
— there is no other basis than this voluntaristic and aesthetic 
one. Nietzsche sometimes uses this word, " aesthetic, " so often 
repugnant to moral thinkers. 32 His meaning becomes clear in 
illustrations he uses. For example, we commonly take for 

29 Cf. The Antichristian, §55 ("There are questions where decision 
as to truth and untruth is not possible for man; all supreme questions, 
all ultimate problems of value are beyond human reason " ) . 

80 Zarathustra, IV, ix; Genealogy etc., Ill, §24. 

31 Zarathustra, I, i. Cf. the high view of man as creator as well as 
creature in Beyond Good and Evil, § 225. 

32 Cf. Mixed Opinons etc., § 329; Dawn of Day, § 114; Joyful Science, 
§§3, 13, 77, 290, 294; Zarathustra, III, iv; xii, §2; IV, vi; beyond Good 
and Evil, §205; Werke, XII, 64, §116; 95-6, §193; XIII, 154, §363. 
Morality being a personal choice and the ultimate moral valuation deter- 
mining the character of one's philosophy, every great philosophy has been 
a self-confession of its author, a sort of involuntary and unconscious 
me'moires {Beyond Good and Evil, §6). 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 337 

granted that we should do this and that, since otherwise our 
life would be in danger. But suppose a man is ready, for the 
sake of honor or knowledge or some supreme passion, to risk his 
life or to throw it away, how shall we argue with him, what 
common premise have we to start from, since we take life as 
supreme and he something else? Or, again, we often say that 
this or that is good, because posterity and the preservation of 
the race depend on it. But this presupposes that we will pos- 
terity and the preservation of the race. Suppose that some 
one does not, the instinct and demand that is so strong in most 
of us being weak or lacking (Nietzsche thinks that it is not 
necessary) — what then? What will reasoning help in such cir- 
cumstances ? 33 Or, supposing that we are all agreed that exist- 
ence is desirable, what kind of existence shall it be? Some 
may prefer the greatest possible amount of existence, at least 
of comfortable, happy existence. Others may prefer the highest 
type of existence, even if small in amount, or if the comfort 
and happiness of the mass would have to be sacrificed some- 
what to attain it. How is a decision to be reached? There 
would appear to be a difference of ultimate ideals, last choices. 
That the welfare of the mass is in itself the more valuable end 
is a naivete which Nietzsche leaves to the English biologists. 34 
In truth, there is no value in itself, all values are posited, set, 
and relative to those who posit them. Instead of a rationale 
(i.e., rational deduction) of supreme ideals, it is possible only 
to give a psychology of them — that is, to indicate how as matter 
of fact they arise: and this is the sixth point. Ideals, says 
Nietzsche, [though he is speaking here of his own personal ideals, 
I think he would say that the truth is general] are the anticipa- 
tory hopes, i.e., hoped-for satisfactions of our impulses ; as surely 
as we have impulses, so inevitably do they work on our fancy 
to produce a scheme of what we [or things] should be, to satisfy 
them — this is what idealizing means. Even the rascal has his 
ideal, though it may not be edifying to us. 35 Nietzsche does not 
blink the fact that ideals, and ideals of honest people, may 
vary, that there is no one of which we can say with logical 

38 Werke, XII, 220, § 155. 

34 Note at the end of Genealogy etc., I. 

35 Werke, XI, 390, § 613. 



338 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

honesty (men being as they are today) that it is the ideal. 
Especially at the present are differences rife. 36 Even when 
men agree in calling certain things good, they differ as to which 
are better and the best — that is, the order of rank (Rangor ti- 
nting) is different. 37 The very concepts of things — of health, 
for instance — differ. To a Schopenhauerian or Buddhist, a 
strong lusty man, eager for life and power, is not in a state of 
health at all ; while from another point of view, it is the Scho- 
penhauerian or Buddhist, craving for the extinguishment of his 
individuality, who is sick. 38 It is the final ruling impulse in 
every case that fixes the ideal, and even gives names to things 
corresponding to its valuations. 

The practical conclusion of all this is that in his own case 
Nietzsche, who most surely has an ideal, does not make any 
pretensions of absolute rationality about it and does not propose 
to force it upon any one else, whether by arms or by logic. 
He simply says to us, "This is my way; what is yours? The 
way there is not." In other language, "I am a law only for 
my own kind, I am no law for all." 39 Indeed, having in mind 
the native differences and inequalities of men, he thinks it no 
special distinction to have an ideal that everybody shares with 
us. An ideal is something in which we body forth our very 
will and personality; how can we expect that all others will 
have just the same, unless we are like all the rest and have no 
distinctive being of our own? 40 As we shall see, particular 
ideals Nietzsche expects will vary more or less among different 
classes. The ideal that mankind may have in common can only 
be very general and one that for many will perhaps seem far 
away. 

All the same, ideals may be recommended, and the possibly 
universal ones to all. While mankind has no generally recog- 
nized goal at present, and to go ahead and lay down moral 
rules as if it had, is unreason and trickery, recommending a 

■• Ibid., 371-2, §576; cf. 196, §102. 

37 Beyond Good and Evil, § 194. 

38 Werke, XII, 124-5, §244; 78, § 150; 80, § 155. 

39 Zarathustra, III, xi, § 2; IV, xii; cf. Joyful Science, § 321; Werke, 
XIII, 176, §404; XI, 220-1, §155 ("An impulse to live individually 
exists : I think in its service. Others who do not have the impulse cannot 
be obligated by me"). 

40 Cf. Will to Power, § 349. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 339 

goal is different, for if it pleased mankind, mankind could 
adopt it and give itself a corresponding moral law of its own 
pleasure. 41 And despite all Nietzsche's concern for freedom, 
he is eager to recommend his own ideal — eager and, one might 
almost say, imperious. The higher meaning of the world's 
spiritual endeavor, the supreme significance of the striving of 
the highest minds is, he thinks, to find the thought that will 
stand over mankind as its star. 42 He enters the lists — here is 
the practical meaning of his will to power. 

Yet, though Nietzsche recognizes this voluntaristic or 
aesthetic basis of the moral aim he proposes, we must not be led 
to think that there is any lack of stringency, whether logical 
or practical, in the aim when once accepted. All morality, 
Nietzsche's included, involves law and subordination. We 
choose the ideal, not the means by which to attain it — these 
are fixed by the general nature of things. The taste that is 
voluntary is only the supreme taste, not the lesser ones. If we 
want a strong physical organism, what we like or dislike at 
the moment, whether as to exercise or to diet, may count for 
little — so and so we have got to live. 43 It is the same with a 
great social ideal: if we will the end, we must will the means, 
whether they strike the fancy and please us or not. Even a 
musical melody, remarks Nietzsche, "has laws of logic which 
our anarchists would cry down as slavery. ' ' 44 Professor Riehl 
cites in this connection Goethe's word about "exact fancy," 
the fancy of the classic artist, of classic art; he says that moral 
judgments, even taken as aesthetic, remain absolute demands, 
whose object is formed by generally valid ideas of value. 4£ 
Nietzsche thinks that connecting morals with art in general 
means no reproach, I may say in passing. It is true that art 
has as a rule looked backward, glorifying the past; but in its 
essential nature it is simply an ideal-building force, a making 
visible of our innermost hopes and wishes. 46 From this point 

41 Dawn of Day, § 108. 

42 Werke, XII, 360, § 679. 

48 Nietzsche calls it the greatest error to think that taste determines 
the value of a food or an action (Werke, XII, 78, § 150). Cf. the remark 
about " actual relevance to the preservation of life, strict causality ' 
(Werke, XI, 204, § 121). 

44 Letter to Krug, Brief e, I, 321. 

45 Op. cit., pp. 130-1. 

49 Werke, XIV, 355, § 178. 



340 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

of view, morality is itself a species of art. But it is a very 
particular species, since while it starts with a picture, it pro- 
ceeds to create in flesh and blood, the philosopher-artist taking 
the lead, the rest of us being fashioned or fashioning ourselves 
according to the requirements of the ideal projected. So 
Goethe 's ' ' Prometheus ' ' : 

" Here sit I, form men 
After my image." 47 

Life comes thus to be very strictly under law, and obedience 
a part of the nature of most of us. ' ' To the good soldier ' Thou 
shalt ' sounds pleasanter than ' I will. ' " 48 And for the men 
of the future whom Nietzsche anticipates, there will be some- 
thing a hundredfold more important than how they or others 
feel at the moment, namely an aim for the sake of which they 
are willing to suffer everything, run every risk, and sacrifice 
all (themselves and others) — the great passion. 49 

in 

And now what is the final aim which Nietzsche proposes? 
As I have already stated more than once by way of anticipa- 
tion, it is no other than life, and particularly the highest 
ranges of life. Man is higher than the animal, and there may 
be something higher than man, i.e., than man as we ordinarily 
know him. The instinct for something perfect, or as perfect 
as the conditions of existence will allow, is, I take it, the bottom 
instinct, the ruling impulse in Nietzsche. Essentially he was 
a religious man. Perhaps in the last resort we should not call 
him a moralist in the ordinary restricted sense of that term. 
As I read him, deep instincts of reverence preponderate in him, 
instincts that have their ordinary food and sustenance in the 
thought of God. But as his scientific conscience forbade him 
that belief, the instincts were driven to seek other satisfaction 
and found it (measurably) in the thought of the possibilities of 
mankind. Very far, indeed, was he, from a Comtean worship 

47 See Meyer's fine observations, op. cit., pp. 77-8. 

48 Zarathustra, I, x. 

49 Will to Power, § 26. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 341 

of humanity; the mass of men excited little reverence, rather 
pity or disdain, at best moderate respect for the moderate work 
they do. But now and then there emerge from the ordinary 
run of our species extraordinary individuals, and the thought 
of them, the possibilities they suggested, set his mind on fire. 
If there be no God, he, as it were, said to himself, may there not 
still be something beyond man? From our human stock, may 
not something transcendent arise? It is in the light of such a 
view that I interpret a remark to the effect that his tendency 
as a whole was not to morality, and that from an essentially 
extra-moral way of looking at things he was led to the con- 
sideration of morality — from a distance. 50 The distant elevation 
on which he stood was that essentially of the religious nature. 
For from this standpoint something great belongs to the fabric 
of things, something awe-inspiring, something unreckonable, 
something sovereign and clean above us, and the world and life 
become inevitably flattened, when the thought of it is lost. 51 It 
was Nietzsche's experience, and is the secret of the undertone 
of melancholy that we feel in him. One who knew him inti- 
mately (at least for a time) thinks that his history turned on 
this loss of faith, on " emotion over the death of God," and 
that the possibility of finding a substitute for the lost God be- 
came an animating thought with him. 52 Later, when a read- 
justment had taken place, Nietzsche uses [makes Zarathustra 
use] this significant language: "Once, when men looked on the 
far-stretching sea, they said God ; but I teach you to say, Super- 
man." 53 That is, the conceptions are in a way correlative. The 
future lords of the earth, he says, will "replace God," begetting 
in those whom they rule a ' ' deep, unconditional confidence. ' ' M 
Nietzsche's moral aim starts with a transcendent conception like 
this. The task of the race is to create these lords or Gods — if 

50 Werke, XIV, 74, § 144. 

B1 Cf. passages like Human, etc., § 223; Joyful Science, § 125. 

62 Lou Andreas-Salome, op. cit., pp. 38-9. In a similar spirit Nietzsche 
speaks of the doctrine of eternal recurrence as taking the place of meta- 
physics and religion (Will to Power, §462). 

68 Zarathustra, II, ii. 

54 Werke (pocket ed.), .VII, 486, §36; cf. Zarathustra, IV, xiii, §2 
("God died: now we will that the superman live"); also I, xxii, 
§ 3. He quotes a passage from Plato's Theages : " each of us would like 
if possible to be lord of all men, most of all to be God," and adds " this 
sentiment must arise again " ( Will to Power, § 958 ) . 



342 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

you cannot create a God, Zarathustra says, stop talking of one. 55 
That is, the morality of Nietzsche is a semi-religious morality. 
To this extent, he belongs in a different category from Utili- 
tarians and others, who, taking men as they are, simply think 
of a way in which they may get along pleasantly and profitably 
together. 56 He rather belongs to the company of those, or of 
One, who said, "be ye perfect/ ' and set up as the standard 
the infinite perfection of God. a "Let the future and the fur- 
thest be the motive of thy today.' ' "Do I counsel you to love 
your neighbor, the one nearest you? I counsel you rather to 
flee the nearest and love the furthest human being. ' ' m In such 
sayings the spirit of the man and the final principle of his 
morality come to light. Man [as he exists] is something to be 
surpassed : 58 that is his starting-point. It is not a proposition 
that can be proven, nothing that can be deduced, nothing that 
can be scientifically established; naivetes of that sort he leaves 
to others : it is simply his choice, the outcome of his ruling im- 
pulse, which is to see the great, the transcendent in the world, 
so far as the conditions of existence allow . b If we do not make 
such a preliminary choice with him, his practical prescriptions 
will have little meaning to us. 

In a sense, the aim might be called cosmical, i.e., the world 
is apparently thought of as pressing to a higher realization of 
its potencies through us in this way. Nietzsche says, "We are 
buds on one tree — what do we know of what can come out of 
us in the interests of the tree! . . . No. Beyond 'me' and 
1 thee ' ! To feel cosmically ! ' ' 59 

I have spoken of Nietzsche's instinct for the perfect — how 

05 Zarathustra, II, ii. Still further, "God is a conjecture; but what 
I wish is that your conjecturing should go no further than your creative 
will." Again, " He who does not find the great in God any more finds it 
in general no more — he must either deny or create it " ( TFerfce, XII, 329, 
§536). 

86 Such a view, ever asking how man can maintain himself best, 
longest, most agreeably, is what makes men of today small and common 
( Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 3 ) . 

57 Zarathustra, I, xvi. 

68 Ibid., prelude, §3. Cf. IV, xiii, §3 ("it is the superman whom I 
have at heart — he is my first and only, and not man. . . . Oh, my 
brothers, what I can love in man is that he is a transition, a passing 
away") ; also, I, x ("let your love to life be love to your highest hope; 
and let your highest hope be your highest thought of life " ) . 

68 Werke, XII, 128-9, § 248. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 343 

real it was comes out in a variety of minor indirect ways. 
Zarathustra gives comfort to his guest-disciples in the thought 
of the little good perfect things already in the world — put them 
around you, he says, their golden ripeness heals the heart; the 
perfect teaches hope. 60 Nietzsche knows the charm of the im- 
perfect, but, as already explained, it is in its suggestions, not 
for itself. 61 Oddly as it may sound in these secular days, he 
pronounces the love of man ' ' for God 's sake ' ' the most superior 
and elevated sentiment which mankind has hitherto reached — a 
love of man, without this thought of something beyond that 
hallows it, being a more or less stupid and brutish thing. 62 
"To man my will clings, with chains I bind myself fast to man, 
because so I am pulled up to the superman: for thither moves 
my other will." 63 "Grant me from time to time a glimpse of 
something complete, finished, happy, mighty, triumphant, in 
which there is still something of fear, a glimpse of a man who 
justifies mankind, a complementary and redeeming instance, for 
whose sake we can hold fast our faith in man ! ' ' 64 For man as 
he is is not a happy throw of nature 's dice ; there is something 
fundamentally wrong (verfehltes) with him; connecting with 
the old religious language, Nietzsche says that in place of the 
sinfulness we must substitute the general ill-constitutedness 
(Missrathensein) of man. 65 He is tentative material merely; 
the failures preponderate; broken fragments, ruins (ein T rum- 
mer j eld) are what we see about us. 66 Hence suffering is Nietz- 
sche's main feeling. 67 We thirst, he says, for great and deep 
souls, and discover at best a social animal. 68 Only a living 
habitual sense of perfect things could beget a dissatisfaction 
like this. 

The aim which Nietzsche proposes is different, he thinks, 
from that of previous moralities. The various moral judgments 

80 Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 15. 

81 Joyful Science, § 79. 

82 Beyond Good and Evil, § 60. So " in thy friend thou shalt love the 
superman as thy motive" {Zarathustra, I, xvi). 

68 Zarathustra, II, xxi. 
84 Genealogy etc., I, § 12. 
86 Werke, XIV, 204, §405; 330, § 166. 

96 Will to Power, § 713. Cf. the descriptions in Zarathustra, II, xx. 
67 Genealogy etc., I, § 11 (" denn wir leiden am Menschen, es ist kein 
Zweifel"). 

08 Werke, XIII, 213, § 498. 



344 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

of the past have been in the interest of " peoples,' ' "races," 
etc., not of the species man and its utmost development, and 
indeed of peoples who wished to assert themselves against other 
peoples, classes who wished to mark themselves off from other 
classes. Morality has been an instrument for the preservation 
of a group (of some kind), not for the development of the 
race. 69 This we have seen in the preceding criticism. Even in 
Christian morality he finds no exception, since he sees in it an 
assertion of the interest of the mass as against the class that 
had ordinarily stood above them, the kingdom of heaven being 
only an order in which the mass-morality (Heerdenmoral) 
should rule absolutely, leaving no room for moral conceptions of 
another order, and no place for another than social type of 
man. But for the mass to aim at their own good and make 
their valuations supreme, is not necessarily to raise the type of 
man; nay, just to the extent this morality dominates and ex- 
cludes all others, it tends to fix the human type as it now 
exists and prevent the rise of anything different and higher. 
Here is the secret of the antagonism, violent at times, which 
Nietzsche manifests to Christian morality. By its very attrac- 
tiveness and sweetness, by the very validity it has within a lim- 
ited area (for he never questions the place of mutual love and 
help), it seduces us to give it an absolute authority and leads 
us away from the thought of those higher possibilities of man- 
kind that alone, to his mind, make life greatly worth while. 
The carrying life to new and [practically] superhuman heights, 
not security, happiness and comfort for the mass, is Nietzsche's 
ideal. 

rv 

The aim is vague and yet already with it Nietzsche has a 
principle for judging things. With an ultimate value, he 
estimates other things accordingly. If the highest reach of life 
is the measure of things, then good is what tends that way, and 
bad what tends in an opposite direction. There are lines of 
procedure now, possible actions, feelings, thoughts, institutions, 
laws that harmonize with movement toward the desired goal — 
they are then to be furthered ; other courses are to be opposed. 
99 Ibid., XIII, 141-2, §§ 327-9. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 345 

Nietzsche calls it a naturalistic view ; by this he means that there 
are no " oughts" or " ought nots" transcending life, but that 
life itself is the ultimate standard, and that " ought" and " ought 
not ' ' are fixed by the demands of life 70 — in the last resort, 
the demands of the highest life. He also has in mind the fact 
that we are bodies, a certain type of physiological organization, 
something far more and deeper than our momentary thoughts 
and feelings, or, for that matter, the whole reign of our con- 
scious life, c and that it is this perduring substratum, the same 
whether we are awake or asleep, the same more or less in father 
and son, this actual line of physiological descent, out of which 
the higher men of the future are to spring — in other words, 
that we carry in our loins now the superman, that he is no 
angel from other spheres or bodiless phantasm like the Greek 
Gods. 71 This is the meaning of the value which Nietzsche gives 
to the earth, of which we hear so much in Zarathustra. Stay 
true to the earth, he exclaims, and lead the virtue that has flown 
away from the earth back to it, back to body and life. 72 
Deserting life and wallowing in the thought of some other sort 
of existence is the supreme disloyalty. 73 To spin the threads 
of our human life so that they ever become stronger — that is 
the task. 74 Let us now see how the supreme valuation brings 
still other detailed valuations in its wake. 

First, we have a standard for measuring truth and good- 
ness. These are valuable so far as they serve life, but they are 
not supreme over life. If there are truths that are unfavorable to 
life (and we have no guarantee that there may not be such and 
rather reason to think that there are some — unfavorable at least 
to the life of most) , there is no absolute duty to know them. Some 
forms of goodness — for instance, the mass ideals of goodness 
taken absolutely — may work contrary to the highest forms of 
life, . may paralyze the springs of great desires 75 — they are 

70 Twilight etc., v, §4; cf. Will to Power, §462. 

71 Cf. Werke, XII, 362, § 688 (mankind must set its aim beyond itself, 
not, however, in a false world, but in its own continuation) ; cf. XIV, 
263, § 10. 

72 Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 2. Zarathustra loves those who do not have 
to seek a reason beyond the stars for sacrifice (prologue, § 4). 

78 Cf. Zarathustra, prologue, §3 (once crime against God was the 
greatest crime; now the most terrible thing is to sin against the earth). 
74 Will to Power, § 674. 
"Ibid., §244. 



346 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

not binding upon all. The hostile, destructive spirit (the Bose), 
not love and pity only, has work to do in the world. 

Second, we are able to judge the popular ethical notion that 
the aim of morality is the general welfare, or, as it is some- 
times put, the preservation and furthering of the interests of 
mankind. Preserving, says Nietzsche, but in what, along what 
line? Furthering, but toward what? Is it the longest possible 
duration of mankind that is in mind or its greatest possible 
deanimalization ? — for these things may contradict one another. 
To Nietzsche, I need not say, a line of ascending life is better, 
even though it comes to an end, than life continuing on the 
same level, even though it be indefinitely prolonged. 76 "Gen- 
eral welfare" is equally ambiguous; or, if it means that the 
welfare of the mass is the goal to be aimed at as opposed to 
the evolution of higher types, which may have to be at the ex- 
pense of the mass, then "general welfare" is a false and anti- 
evolutionary principle. 77 Indeed, remembering how man has 
risen from the animal and higher races from lower, only as 
superior members of a species got an advantage over the rest 
and bred more successfully their kind (a higher species thus in 
time resulting), Nietzsche says that the principle, "the good of 
the majority is to be preferred to that of individuals," is 
enough to take mankind in the course of time back to the 
lowest animality, for it is the reverse principle, "individuals 
are of more importance than the mass," that has elevated 
it.? 

Third, we have a measurement of healthy and sickly — 
health taken as covering body and spirit (things perhaps ulti- 
mately not so very different). Whatever Schopenhauer and 
Christian saints may say from their standpoint, to Nietzsche 
those who turn away from life and exalt virtues antithetical 
to life are sick, and they rank lower, are less desirable members 
of the species, on this account. It is the sound and strong who 
keep alive our confidence in life — and their right to be, the 
prerogative of the bell with full tone, is a thousandfold greater 
than the right of the discordant and broken; the latter under- 

78 Dawn of Day, § 106; cf. Will to Power, § 864 (towards the close). 
71 Dawn of Day, § 106; Beyond Good and Evil, § 228; Genealogy etc., 
I, note at the end. 

78 Werke, XI, 223, § 160; cf. ante, in this volume, p. 64. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 347 

mine life and faith in life — they, and not the Bosen and 
''robber-animals," are man's greatest danger. 79 

Fourth, we can now measure egoism and altruism from a 
standpoint superior to either. Dr. Dolson, perhaps the earliest 
philosophical student of Nietzsche in America, says that "the 
one name that can be given" to his system "without qualification 
is egoism"; but she straightway begins to make qualifications — 
and really they are most necessary. 80 For all depends on who 
or what the ego is. The egoism of one who represents the rising 
tide of life is justified, though only in those who reach the 
highest crest is it completely justified, all the rest having their 
ends more or less beyond themselves. The egoism of the sickly 
and the degenerate, on the other hand, is not justified, it is rather 
something pitiful and revolting. 81 In a similar way altruism is 
justified so far as there are (or may be) others better than our- 
selves; altruism under these conditions is justified, even if car- 
ried to the point of sacrifice. But altruism is not justified, when 
the "others" are not worth preserving and belong to those 
whose reason for existence has ceased to be (if it ever was). d 

Fifth, life being essentially a process, a series of actions, 
a successive accumulation and expenditure of force, an adverse 
judgment is necessarily involved on viewing anything that is 
static, like pleasure or happiness, as an end. Life is not a means 
to enjoyment (Genuss). The noble soul does not wish to enjoy, 
save as it gives enjoyment. 82 Whether it be pleasure or happi- 
ness or Carlyle's "blessedness" or peace of mind or good con- 
science, any and all are but incidents by the way. 83 We are 
here rather to develop a certain kind and way of acting, and 
move toward a certain end; it is this, and not any momentary 
state or how we feel, that is the critical thing. It seems to be 
taken for granted in many quarters that pleasure of some kind 

79 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 14. 

80 Op. cit., p. 101. 

81 Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 1. The egoism (Eigenliebe) of the " Siechen 
und Siichtigen" "stinkt" {ibid., Ill, xi, §2). Cf. still further on the 
two kinds of egoism, Will to Power, § 873. 

82 Werke, XIV, 95, § 198; Zarathustra, III, xii, § 5. 

88 Werke, XII, 137-8, § 266. As to the various meanings of " peace 
of mind," see Twilight etc., v, § 3 ; as to " blessedness," Will to Power, 
§911. Cf. the characterization of "enjoyment, coarse, heavy, brown 
enjoyment, as those who enjoy life, our ' educated ' class, our rich men 
and rulers understand it" {Joyful Science, preface, §4). 



-J 



348 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

(gross or refined) must be the final end of every act, moral 
action only differing in that it seeks lasting pleasure, or the 
greatest or the highest pleasure, or others' pleasure as well as 
our own; that there is no raison d'etre for an action save in the 
agreeable feeling it gives somewhere. 6 Nietzsche had argued 
more or less in this way in his purely critical period, but he 
has now come to give pleasure an entirely subordinate place. 84 
He thinks indeed that it is the commoner sort of men who 
especially seek pleasure, the greater sort wishing above all to 
expend their force, more or less indifferent to pleasure and 
pain calculations. 85 He regards marked emphasis on pleasure 
and particularly craving for enjoyment as "symptomatic": it 
implies people who lack these things — a more or less suffering 
and unhappy class. 86 "Utility and enjoyment" are really 
"slave" theories of life, i.e., of those who are overburdened 
and want relief from their hard lot. 87 The strong man is not 
after happiness — but he acts, acts successfully, and in that 
action is happiness: happiness comes without his seeking it — 
it is comes, not dux of his virtue. 88 This does not mean con- 
tempt of happiness — Nietzsche knows its place as an adjunct 
in life. 89 He even gives to utilitarianism a certain relative 
validity — it is the natural doctrine of the great working mass 
of men, and of those who take their standpoint. 90 But he abso- 
lutely refuses to regard happiness (sensation of any kind) as 
the final measure of what is desirable, and has a kind of con- 
tempt for "green pastures and quiet waters" felicity, when 
made a universal ideal; 91 he even thinks that the "salvation of 

84 Cf. Will to Power, § 928. 

** Werke, XIII, 177, §405; Will to Power, §§579, 909, 1022. 

86 Werke, XII, 152, § 359; cf. Will to Power, §§ 781, 790. Christianity 
with its vista of future " blessedness " is a typical way of thinking for 
a suffering and impoverished species of man (Will to Power, §222). 

87 Will to Power, § 758. Hence the running fire on utilitarianism 
(whether egoistic or universalistic), and, since England is its principal 
home, the sarcastic references to Englishmen. As to utilitarianism, see 
Werke, XIII, 150-1; Beyond Good and Evil, §§174, 188, 190, 225, 228, 
260; as to Englishmen, Will to Power, §§930, 944; Twilight etc., i, § 12. 

88 Werke, XIII, 158, § 367; XII, 137-8, § 266; Will to Power, §§ 1023, 
1026. So love is comes of reason and justice, joy in it, pleasure in its 
possession, desire to possess it wholly and in all its beauty — the cesthetic 
side of reason and justice, a subsidiary impulse {Werke, XII, 137, § 265). 

89 Cf. the recognition of Bentham and particularly Helvetius {Werke, 
XIII, 107). 

80 Cf. Werke, XIII, 150-1, § 356. 
01 Will to Power, §957. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 349 

the soul" is a better aim and a fuller conception than the hap- 
piness which moralists talk about, since it covers the whole 
willing, creating, feeling self and not merely a secondary 
accompanying phenomenon like happiness. 92 f 

Sixth, Nietzsche's final principle involves judgment on the 
idea sometime advanced that we are to develop all the impulses 
of our nature. "Develope all thy powers? but that means: 
develope anarchy! Go to pieces!" 938 A ruling principle, a 
master impulse is necessary, something to bring all the rest of 
our being into order, and that is what a final aim like Nietzsche '& 
does. h 

And now I come to a paradox. Nietzsche makes life supreme 
and yet honors on occasion those who risk their life or even 
sacrifice it. Indeed, he says in general that one should part 
with life as Ulysses did from Nausicaa — more blessing it than 
in love with it. 94 Is this inconsistent ? Let us see. What is life 
(as he understands it) ? Heaped-up force which in turn ex- 
pends itself, a continuous process of this sort. The acting, 
expending is the final thing, and doing this in a certain way, 
for a certain end, is to his mind the moral. But suppose such 
action puts one's existence in peril, what then? If persisted 
in, is life thereby despised? In a sense it certainly is — for we 
no longer set a supreme value on continued existence. If we 
care for life in that sense above all else we may go far, but 
shall not actually put it in jeopardy — simple prudence will hold 
us back. And yet we find Nietzsche on occasion despising pru- 
dence. He even honors a strong sinner more than one who is 
held back by motives of this sort. 95 Those he counts great are 
always those who can transcend them. "I love him/' says 
Zarathustra, "whose soul is prodigal," who "will not save him- 
self." "What matters long life! What warrior wishes to be 
spared!" "Myself I sacrifice unto my love, and my neighbors 
as myself. ' ' 96 Nietzsche goes so far [he is careless of formal 

92 Werke, XIII, 152, § 361. 

93 Ibid., XI, 277, § 304. 

64 Beyond Good and Evil, § 96. 

96 Zarathustra, prologue, §3; cf. Werke, XI, 250, §§216-8; Will to 
Power, § 909. President Wilson said, when Governor-elect of New Jersey 
(1911), "God defend us against compromise; I would rather be a knave 
than a coward." 

ot Zarathustra, prologue, §4; 1, x. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §13 



350 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

consistency] as to say, "much is more highly prized by the 
living being than life itself ' ? ; and again, "men have become 
so pitiable that even the philosophers do not notice the deep 
contempt with which antiquity and the middle ages treated this 
'self-evident value of values, life.' " 97 Have we then a contra- 
diction? Verbally, yes; but not really in thought. The fact 
is that "life" may be taken in two senses: on the one hand it 
may mean the inner active process already described, on the 
other, something static and external, mere existence. Nietzsche 
implies the two meanings and puts the matter in a nutshell, 
when he says that to risk life is not to despise it, but rather to 
lift it to a higher potency. 981 The supreme act of life (in one 
sense) may be to lose it (in another). Even the life of the 
species, in the sense of its mere continued existence, is not the 
end to Nietzsche. 99 The great man, the genius, the superman, 
the final raison d'etre of the species, is himself a prodigal 
(Verschwender) — that he spends himself is his greatness; the 
instinct of self-preservation is suspended in him, the mighty 
urge of the forces streaming out through him forbidding every 
such care and precaution. 100 



A word as to the objectivity of Nietzsche's standard. He 
is sometimes said to give us only a subjective arbitrary mora- 
ity, 101 being compared to the Greek Sophists who denied all 
objective norms. The element of truth in such a view we have 
already seen — all morality is, according to him, the result of 
subjective demand somewhere; but in another way it contains 
more error than truth. Though ends are set by the intelligent 

("a living thing will above all expend its force — self-preservation is only 
one of the indirect and most frequent results of this " ) ; Werke, XIV, 
314, § 146 (mankind a mass of force, which grows and must spend itself). 

87 Zarathustra, II, xii; Werke, XI, 223, § 159. 

88 Will to Power, § 929. 
88 Ibid., § 864. 

100 Twilight etc., ix, §44; cf. Werke, XIV, 335, §178. 0. Kulpe 
leaves this out of account when he speaks of life at any price as Nietzsche's 
supreme value {Die Philosophie der Oegenwart in Deutschland, 3rd ed., 
p. 65). Meyer remarks that Nietzsche's own short life, inspired and 
productive as it was, was better than a long, healthy life, filled with 
moderate labors {Jahrbuch fur das classische Alterthum, Vol. V, p. 727). 

101 Cf. Arthur Drews, op. cit., p. 312. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 351 

will and have no existence apart from it, the particular end 
which Nietzsche himself chooses is something that belongs to 
the realm of nature itself, and, once turned into an end, it 
becomes as exacting, and as independent of individual caprice 
or even individual welfare in its requirements, as natural law 
itself could be. j An American writer from whom many seem 
to get their ideas of Nietzsche, but who unfortunately more or 
less vulgarizes him, says that completely rejecting "all fixed 
codes of morality,' ' he leaves a man to "judge a given action 
solely by its effects upon his own welfare, his own desire or will 
to live, and that of his children after him." 102 There could 
hardly be a greater misunderstanding. For what has the 
ascending life of humanity necessarily to do with any chance 
individual's personal welfare, or that of his children, unless 
indeed they are a part of that ascending life, in which case 
their welfare is a matter not so much of personal, as of general 
moment? This writer says, "Nietzsche offers the gospel of 
prudent and intelligent selfishness, of absolute and utter indi- 
vidualism." 103 But Nietzsche expressly declares, "my phi- 
losophy aims at an order of rank, not at an individualistic 
morality "; m k he derides the morals of individual happiness, it 
is not science and not wisdom, but mere prudence mixed with 
stupidity ; 105 he calls it the most immodest of arriere-pensees to 
measure good and evil from the standpoint of our personal 
selves. 106 Particularly if a man belongs to the descending line 
of life, is it a horror in Nietzsche's eyes when he says, "all for 
myself. ' ' 107 Ascending life and the highest possible ascent 
being the measure of things, 108 individuals are themselves good 

102 Henry L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, pp. 
92-3. 

108 Op. cit., p. 102. These crudities are retained in the "fully re- 
vised," 3rd ed. 

104 Will to Power, § 287. 

106 Beyond Good and Evil, § 198. 

106 Dawn of Day, § 102. Frank Thilly hardly bears this in mind in 
speaking of Nietzsche as standing for an extreme form of moral indi- 
vidualism, every one striking for himself (Hibbert Journal, October, 1911, 
pp. 262-3); and Paul Carus is absolutely mistaken in speaking (in the 
announcement of his book on Nietzsche) of Nietzsche's, along with Max 
Stirner's, " extreme individualism, which regards every single person as 
an absolutely autonomous sovereign being." On the other hand, Simmel 
makes all the discriminations needed {op. cit., pp. 242-5). 

107 Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 1. 

108 Cf. a statement like that of Will to Power, § 354 or § 373. 



352 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

and bad as they belong to it or no — at least as they further or 
retard it. 

The standard is of such a nature that it is independent of 
personal feeling — or even opinion. Can one think, Nietzsche 
asks, of a madder extravagance or vanity than to judge the 
worth of existence by agreeable or disagreeable feelings ? m 
One is not well because he feels so, any more than one is 
"guilty," "sinful" because he feels so — witches not only were 
believed to be guilty, but they thought themselves so. 110 By this 
is meant that as health is a matter of objective physiological 
measurement, so is life, advancing life, and the highest life. m 
The value of a "thou oughtst" is independent of opinion about 
it, as certainly as the value of a medical prescription is inde- 
pendent of whether one thinks scientifically, or like an old 
woman, about medicine. 112 The greatest sincerity of conviction 
avails nothing ; on the other hand, decisive and valuable actions 
may be done without assurance of conscience. 113 It is plain 
from utterances like these that Nietzsche thinks that in his 
standard of value he has something absolutely objective. It is 
even independent of our chance affirmation of it. To call an 
action good, he derisively exclaims, because our conscience says 
yes to it ! It is as if a work of art became beautiful because it 
pleased the artist! As if the value of music were determined 
by our enjoyment of it, or the enjoyment of the composer ! m 
All this subjective way of judging things that have really a 
law and logic of their own is abhorrent to Nietzsche. 115 Life is 
something objective to him ; being at bottom an organization of 
power, the worth of any particular specimen depends upon how 
much power it incorporates, and upon how high the level is to 
which the power attains. 116 The whole range of feeling, even of 
consciousness, is more or less accidental in relation to it. Feel- 
ing makes nothing good, and consciousness is a means of life, 

109 Ibid., §674. 

110 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 16; cf. Werke, XII, 148, §293. 

111 Cf. the suggestions of Will to Power, § 291. 

112 Werke, XIV, 402, §278; XIII, 129, §§293-4. 
118 Ibid., XIII, 134, § 310; 135, § 311. 

114 Werke, XIII, 135, § 311; Will to Power, § 291. 
110 Cf., as to music and the lack of an aesthetics of music at the 
present time, Will to Power, §§ 838, 842. 
116 Ibid., §674. 



THE MORAL AIM PROPOSED BY NIETZSCHE 353 

more or less a help, too much, of it a hindrance, 117 but never a 
basic thing in life — he holds to the old Schopenhauerian view in 
this respect, which has points of contact with what is called 
the "instrumental" view now. Nietzsche himself speaks of the 
necessity of an objective valuation. 118 He believes that he has 
an objective value. He is in reality the opposite, as Professor 
Simmel has remarked, of the Greek Sophists or of a thinker like 
Max Stirner in recent times, for whom the only reality is the 
individual subject, each subject judging according to its own 
personal standpoint ; in Stirner, not in Nietzsche, is the position 
of the Sophists revived. 1 

117 Nietzsche says, "everything good is instinct," which is not the 
same as saying, " every instinct is good," a confusion to which A. S. 
Pringle-Pattison comes very near (op. cit., p. 313). Nietzsche's general 
view is that consciousness is only an instrument in the development of 
life — reason too (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 191). 

118 Will to Power, § 707; cf. Werke, XIII, 135, §311 (a community's 
" advantage " distinguished from its pleasurable feelings ) . 



CHAPTER XXV 

MORAL CONSTRUCTION (Cont.). THE MORAL AIM AND 
WILL TO POWER 



* 'Will to power " is primarily with Nietzsche an analysis of 
reality — as we have seen in Chapter XV, he finds an impulse of 
this description at the base of man's being, and then proceeds 
to construe life and the world at large in terms of it. It is 
fundamentally a psychological and cosmological, not ethical doc- 
trine. So and so man and the world are made, here lies the 
bottom spring (or springs) — such is the meaning of it. 1 

As matter of fact, Nietzsche was not laudatory of power in 
his early days a nor was he unqualifiedly so in his second period, 
and some kinds of power did not have his admiration even in 
the last period. 

Indeed, power in and of itself was never a standard to Nietz- 
sche — and since there is so much misconception on this point, it 
may be well to bring out the fact clearly at the outset, and then 
later indicate the connection between power, or will to it, and 
the general ethical aim which he proposes, as stated in the last 
chapter. 2 

n 

Use is made by some 3 of an incident in Nietzsche's early 
life, when he was caught out in a thunderstorm and felt, as 
he said, an incomparable elevation in witnessing the lightning, 
the tempest, the hail — free, non-ethical forces, pure will un- 
troubled by the intellect. 4 b It was an experience such as any 

1 Richter remarks that the larger interpretation comes in Nietzsche's 
closing period, the doctrine having been primarily psychological (op. cit., 
p. 271). 

2 N. Awxentieff in his interesting study, Kultur-ethisches Ideal Nietz- 
sches, expounds first the doctrine of will to power, and then the theory 
of "natural" morality (see particularly pp. 117-38). 

8 E.g., by A. S. Pringle-Pattison (op. cit., pp. 261-2). 
♦Letter to von Gersdorff, April 7, 1866 (Briefe, I, 25-6). 

354 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 355 

reflecting student, harassed in various ways, might have, and 
is essentially Schopenhauerian in the manner in which it is 
described. But though he felt the glory of nature's life, he did 
not set up nature as a model, then or at any time. In a striking 
passage in one of his later books, Beyond Good and Evil, he 
speaks of the impossibility of living " according to nature." 
Nature, he says, is wasteful, indifferent, without purpose or 
consideration, pity or justice, at once fearful, desert-like, and 
uncertain, indifference itself being power — one recalls Matthew 
Arnold's sonnet "In Harmony with Nature." The Stoics 
really put their moral ideal into nature — and then proceeded 
to find it natural ! 5 c Indeed, Nietzsche dissents from the whole 
conception, so common in our day, of morality and life as con- 
sisting in adjustment to external conditions. To be determined 
by our environment, rather than to shape it more or less our- 
selves, is to him a sign of decadence. 6 Much that looks like a 
simple effect of environment is, he urges, really the result of 
an active adaptation from within — exactly the same circum- 
stances being treated in different ways (according to the nature 
of the inner impulse). 7 He criticises Spencer and Darwin for 
overvaluing outer conditions 8 and would probably have agreed 
with William James against John Fiske and Grant Allen in 
their famous controversy about "Great Men" some years ago. d 
A genius, he says, is not explained by the conditions of his rise, 9 
and he counts it one of the weaknesses of modern life that we 
no longer know how to act, and can only react on incitement 
from without — examples being historians, critics, analyzers, 
interpreters, observers, collectors, readers, and scientific men 
in general, i.e., all who merely note what is and do not create. 10 
It is from nowhere save from within and from the inner- 
most impulses of our nature that Nietzsche takes his moral 
ideal. 

Yes, so strong is the idealizing tendency with him that he 
refuses even to take the dominating morality of our time as the 
ideal of morality. At present the average man, the social man, 
is in the foreground and everything is estimated from the 

6 Beyond Good and Evil, §9. 9 As to Darwin, cf. ibid., § 647. 

8 Will to Power, § 49. ° Ibid., § 70. 

'Ibid., §70. 10 Ibid., §71. 



356 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

standpoint of his interests, to the prejudice of rarer, higher indi- 
viduals who more or less stand apart; and if, says Nietzsche, 
we make this reality over into a morality we have as the result 
that the average are of more value than the exceptions — some- 
thing against which he protests with the whole energy of his 
nature, declaring, ''Against formulating reality into a morality 
I rebel. ' ' u Hence a remark, which shows again how little 
nature and natural tendencies are a norm to him: "I find the 
' cruelty of nature, ' of which so much is said, in another place : 
she is cruel to her fortunate children (Gluckskinder) , she spares 
and protects les humbles." 12 

That Nietzsche's ideal was not one of mere power (of what- 
ever kind), I shall now show by a number of citations — all from 
the writings of his middle and later period, when the doctrine 
of the will to power was taking shape in his mind. We still, 
he says, fall on our knees before force after the old slave- 
fashion, but if we ask how far force deserves to be revered we 
can only answer, to the extent reason blends with it — we must 
ask how far it is ruled by something higher and serves it as its 
instrument and means. 13 You stronger and haughty minds, he 
exclaims, grant us only one thing: lay no new burdens on us, 
but take some of our burdens on yourselves, as becomes the 
stronger ! u He indicates plainly enough that tyrants of the 
ordinary sort are odious to him — whether in the political or 
intellectual realm. 15 He calls it one of the limitations of great 
men that they are too apt to make the lesser kind stupid. 16 We 
may seek to possess things, but not men; authority so as to 
command others is not desirable. 17 He is against the tyranny 
of even true opinions — as if they alone should exist ! 18 It is the 
people with " absolute truth" .who burn Jews and heretics and 
good books, and root out entire cultures, as in Peru and Mexico 
— fanatical love of power leading them on. 19 The same thing^ 

11 Ibid., §685. 

12 Will to Power, § 685. 
18 Dawn of Day, § 548. 

14 Ibid., §514; cf. Human, etc., §158. 

15 Dawn of Day, §§199, 320. 

18 Will to Power, §875; cf. Human, etc., §260. 

17 Werke, XII, 129-30, § 249. 

18 Dawn of Day, § 507. 

16 Ibid., §204. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 357 

leads men of today to do all kinds of shady things to get rich. 20 
"Often slime sits on the throne and the throne on slime." 21 
Mistaken instincts for power, too, are behind the philosopher's 
will for a system — really a will, Nietzsche thinks, to make one's 
self more stupid than one is, "stronger, simpler, more imperious, 
ruder, more tyrannical." 22 Will to power lies behind religious 
domination: priests became the ruling class in later Israel; 
Israel itself, through Christianity, has become a ruling influ- 
ence in our Western world — such domination is objectionable 
to Nietzsche. 23 The people, i.e., the mass, are coming to power 
in modern states — Nietzsche opposes the tendency. 24 Occasion- 
ally violent men take advantage of popular disorders to put 
themselves and their arbitrary will through; but the nobility 
he wishes to see will be enemies both of the lustful populace 
and of these upstarts (Gewalt-Herren). 25 Of the Germany of 
today, he remarks, "It costs dear to come to power: power 
makes stupid (verdummt) j" 26 he means that the interests of 
culture suffer from this preoccupation with external matters. 
Again, "Can one interest oneself in the German Empire? 
Where is the new thought? ... To rule and help the highest 
thought to victory — that is the only thing that could interest 
me in Germany." 27 Of a certain statesman (Bismarck, pre- 
sumably), he says, "Strong. Strong. Strong and mad! Not 
great!" 28 He has misgivings about the book, Will to Power, he 
is preparing, wishing that it could be written in French, so as 
not to have the appearance of giving countenance to German 
imperial aspirations. 29 Indeed, he becomes almost contemptu- 
ous: "Power is tiresome (langweilig) — witness the Empire."! 30 

20 Ibid., §204; cf. Emerson of Americans, "We are great by exclu- 
sion, grasping, and egotism" ("Success" in Society and Solitude). 

21 Zarathustra, I, xi. 

22 Werke, XIV, 353, § 216. 

28 Cf. Daion of Day, § 205; The Antichristian, § 27. 

24 Cf. Zarathustra, III, xii, §11; IV, xiii, §3 (the " Pobel-Misch- 
masch" are the " Herren von Heute"); Werke, XIV, 218, §440 (lower 
kind of men victorious — strange clashing of two principles of morality). 

2 B Zarathustra, III, xii, § 11. 

29 Twilight etc., viii, § 1; cf. Werke, XIII, 350-1, § 870. 

27 Werke, XIII, 352, § 872; cf. XIV, 374, § 251 (on the lowering effect 
of national egoism and hate). 

28 Beyond Good and Evil, § 241. 

29 Werke, XIV, 420, § 304. 

30 Ibid., 244, § 505. 



858 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

All this is not taken into account by those — and they are 
a host, all the way from college presidents down to penny-a- 
liners in the newspapers — who think that Nietzsche proclaims 
an indiscriminate "gospel of might," having particularly in 
mind might of the "wild beast " type; 31 and we shall have to 
proceed with a little care in connecting his ethical end, as 
defined in the previous chapter, with will to power. In a way 
the matter was problematical to him. He makes a note, 
"Rule? Force my type on others? Horrible (grasslich) ! Is 
not my happiness just in contemplating a variety of types? 
Problem. " 32 Indeed, he writes to a friend about his proposed 
book, Will to Power, "I have not gone beyond tentatives, intro- 
ductions, promises of all sorts. ... It has been, all in all, a 
torture, and I have no more courage to think about it. In ten 
years I shall do better. * ' 33 If Nietzsche had lived even half 
so long, he might have produced something that would have 
made his views quite clear ; as it is, we have to do the work of 
clarification more or less ourselves. 

in 

As nearly as I can make out, the logic of his procedure was 
something like this: — The world at bottom is a complex of 
forces, and each pushes itself as far as it can — each on its inner 
side is a will to power. There is no law over these forces 
restraining them, but they are held in check by one another. 
Sometimes order may come from a simple balancing. But some 
may be stronger than others: there are different levels or 
gradations of force. A higher level may make the lower sub- 
ject. What we call the organic world masters thus to a certain 
extent the inorganic, and the higher organic the lower. Force 
becomes more sublimated, spiritual. Man, the weakest thing in 
nature from one point of view, controls through intelligence. 34 
He is after power, like every other energy in nature, but he has 
this peculiar means. The single individual's weakness, too, leads 
him to combine with others, groups arise, and morality, the law 

31 Cf. J. G. Hibben's chapter, "The Gospel of Might," in A Defense 
of Prejudice. 

32 Werke, XII, 365, § 706. 

33 Letter to Peter Gast, February 13, 1887. 

34 Cf. Will to Power, § 856. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 359 

of group-life, becomes as vital to him as intelligence — it is a 
means to power, just as intelligence is. 35 And group-life once 
attained, and the existence of the species becoming tolerably 
secure, the underlying urge of force may push to higher levels 
still and use the group itself as a means. It is the peculiar 
mark of Nietzsche's ethical thinking that he conceives an end 
for man beyond society. Society is a form of human existence, 
but not the highest form. Great individuals spring from so- 
ciety, but they rise above it — the social individual is not the 
highest type. 36 The lonely, the solitary, those whose occupa- 
tions and interests are beyond the sympathy and perhaps even 
the comprehension of most of us, who are half like Epicurean 
Gods apart from the world and move like stars in orbits of their 
own — they are the real end of humanity, they alone are properly 
ends in themselves, mankind existing for them, not they for 
mankind, save as from afar they shine upon us, and lift our 
hearts. Yet the driving force of the whole process from hum- 
blest plant to possible superman is will to power, will not to 
be, but to be more, each level putting itself on top of what lies 
beneath it, and being a new level only as it does so — so that if 
the plant had not had a will to dominate, it would never have 
emerged from the lower inorganic realm, if the animal had not 
had the will to dominate, it would never have differentiated 
itself from the plant, if man had not had the will to dominate 
and put plants and animals under his feet, he would never have 
become what he distinctively is; and if somewhere among men 
now, there is not the will to dominate over other men, to use 
the rank and file as means, instruments to ends beyond them, 
there can never be a higher order of mankind or superman. In 
other words, will to power is the driving force in the whole 
scheme of cosmic evolution, and if there is to be any further 
advance, will to power must still be the inner impulsion. 

If then, as stated in the preceding chapter, life and the 
highest possible ascent of life is Nietzsche's moral aim, will to 
power turns out to be vitally related to it — is indeed but a 
closer and more interior determination or definition of it. One 

35 There may be different kinds of morality in different groups, but 
all alike have this as their hidden spring (Zarathustra, I, xv). 
38 See Simmel's illuminating remarks, op. cit., pp. 206-11. 



360 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

might even say that will to power itself sets the moral aim 
which Nietzsche proposes — only instead of working blindly and 
instinctively, it now deliberately formulates what it desires. 
"Life is to me instinct for growth, for permanence, for the 
amassing of force, for power." 37 It is true that the feeling 
of power and for power may be slight in some; it may be 
almost non-existent in expiring forms of life; all the same, 
it is, as Nietzsche conceives things, the essence of the living 
process, and only as it increases, can there be more and higher 
life. In a word, if life and the highest reach of life are the 
aim, here is the pulse of the machine, and this it is that must 
be quickened. 

Nietzsche accordingly says : 

"Formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a 
mark to aim at (Ziel). 

"What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, 
the will to power, power itself in man. 

"What is bad (schlecht) ? All that comes from weakness. 

"What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing — 
that an obstacle is overcome. 

"Not contentment, but more power; not peace, but war; not 
virtue, but ability (Tiichtigkeit) — virtue in Kenaissance style, 
virtu, virtue free from moralic acid. ' ' 38 

But while power is the end, 6 and but a concrete inner ren- 
dering of life itself, it is plainly power on the human level and 
of the human sort that Nietzsche has in mind — not power of 
any and every description. He does not set up as a standard 
the power of physical nature, or that of tyrants, or of priests 
or of the mass or of an empire, but power such as essentially 
belongs to the evolution of the human type — the final ideal 
being the full and perfect efflorescence of that type, the domina- 
tion in the world of men and things of just that. If mere ab- 

87 The Antichristian, § 6. 

38 Ibid., §§ 1, 2. Other statements are: "I estimate man accord- 
ing to the amount of power and the fullness of his will " ( Will to 
Power, § 382 ) ; " the strongest in body and soul are the best— ground- 
principle for Zarathustra " (Werke, XII, 410) ; "I teach 'No' to all that 
weakens, exhausts, ' Yes ' to all that strengthens, treasures up force, 
justifies the feeling of force" (Will to Power, §54) ; "to go on spinning 
the whole warp and woof of life, and to do it in such a way that the 
thread ever becomes stronger — that is the task" (ibid., §674). 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 361 

stract power were the ideal, then since the brute forces of the 
universe may sometime get the better of life, that would be 
an ideal consummation ; or, since the weak by combination may 
(and actually do in our modern democratic world) make them- 
selves masters of the strong, then that is an end to be desired — 
any chance force or set of forces that happened to get on top 
at any time would represent the desired end. Indeed, if any 
de facto might makes right, a question would arise as to the sense 
of setting up power as an ideal at all, since it effectuates itself 
anyway — there being no situation in the world that is not stata- 
ble as the result of the action and interaction of forces, in which 
some get the upper hand. But Nietzsche is not bete, and so far 
as he speaks of power as a desirable end for man he means just 
a power that does not necessarily effectuate itself, that has to 
be striven for and may or may not be attained — it is emphat- 
ically a power that requires a will to power. 

IV 

Even so, however, it may be said that power is a vague 
conception — too much so to give us any definite guidance in 
acting or judging of things. Let us see then what becomes of 
it in Nietzsche's hands — how he uses it. 

In the first place we notice that in the background of his 
mind there is a certain sense, for all said and done, of the inse- 
curity of life. Mankind is more or less to him, as to Matthew 
Arnold, "a feeble wavering line." Life is not an assured gift, 
it rests on effort, toil, on the will to live — so that there is sense 
in making it an ideal, and in exalting ideals of power. Scho- 
penhauer and the Buddhists actually propose to weaken the 
will to live. Certain types of Christianity practically tend the 
same way. Nietzsche feels that there is need of a fortifying 
doctrine. It is perhaps something to make life and power in 
all their vagueness an end, as against non-life. 

But more than this, the construing life as will to power 
enables him to judge between different types of life — those ani- 
mated by less will to power ranking lower than those with full 
will to power : the descending and ascending lines of life are not 
of equal value. Indeed, on a general basis of this sort he con- 
ceives of the possibility of a properly scientific ethics arising, 



362 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

which should stand to past morals something as chemistry does 
to alchemy. Knowledge being scientific, as it can apply number 
and measure, an attempt is in order to see if a scientific order 
of values cannot be built "on a number and measure scale of 
force/' ascent in the scale signifying increase of value, descent 
diminution of value — all other estimations being prejudices, 
naivetes, misunderstandings. He is aware that we cannot carry 
out the program as yet, that we must have recourse to physiology 
and medicine, to sociology and psychology, and that these 
sciences are not yet developed enough to give us with confidence 
the data we need. 39 All the same he throws out the general idea, 
and we find him following it in a rough approximate way in 
appraising not only differing types of men, but even differing 
moralities. For example : 

(1) He rates great individuals differently from the ordinary 
social man, because they can more or less stand alone, have 
greater strength. Gregarious creatures are, as a rule, indi- 
vidually weak — that is why they combine; they crave power 
(as everything in the world does), but they get it in this way. 
In packs, herds, communities they are strong. But the leaders 
of the flock and individuals of the solitary type (like the lion 
and the eagle among animals) have resources in themselves — 
they have strength and to spare, can give help instead of need- 
ing it, or can prey on others and take them captive. As the 
stronger, they stand higher in Nietzsche's scale of value. Of 
course, no independence is absolute and Nietzsche is well aware 
of it; still beings are graded in his eyes according as they are 
more or less capable of it. 40 

(2) Moralities rank differently according as they spring 
from strength or weakness (for, aside from the morality in- 
volved in any kind of social existence, there are, according to 
Nietzsche, special moralities, bound up with the conditions of 
existence of particular peoples or social classes). He finds, for 
instance, a difference of tone, of emphasis, even of special valua- 
tions, in the moralities of the ruler and subject classes in the 
past — this we have already seen. And why is the "master- 
morality" higher than the "slave-morality"? Because it comes 

80 Cf. Dawn of Day, § 103; Will to Power, § 710. 
40 Cf. Will to Power, § 886. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 363 

from strength, formulates the conditions of life of the stronger 
class. The sense of overflowing power runs through it, while 
the slave-morality is correlated with weakness and the sense of 
need. If we look through the circle of virtues and excellences 
put in the first rank by each class — on the one hand, inde- 
pendence, proud self-respect, honor only for equals with at best 
condescending care or pity for the rest, masterfulness and 
daring of all sorts, contempt of danger, also capacity for otium, 
taste for useless knowledge and accomplishments; on the other 
hand, helpfulness, sympathy, modesty, obedience, patience, hu- 
mility, industry, prudence, invention, and whatever intellectual 
virtues serve the practical needs of life — we see that the one 
set of virtues and excellences is as naturally the idealism of 
an aristocratic class, full of the pride and abounding vigor 
of life, as the other is that of the hard-pressed, much-suffering 
masses of men. And the aristocratic morality ranks higher just 
because it comes from the higher, i.e., stronger, type of men. 

Nietzsche comments on a matter that is of interest in this 
connection and it may be well to take it up at this point. How 
shall we explain the historical antagonism of morality to will 
to power ? Perhaps there is no more prevalent notion than that 
of a contrast between power and right. Now Nietzsche admits 
a certain relative justification for the common attitude. Power 
and the will to it are sometimes dangerous (particularly certain 
crude forms of it), and have to be held in check. 41 f And yet he 
finds a certain speciousness in the antagonism when stated 
broadly, as it usually is. "Morality" is not so much antithetical 
to will to power, as a concealed form of it — that is, behind it 
lies the will to power of the mass, or old-time subject-class. 
Considering itself as the equivalent of the group (it does of 
course compose the majority of it) the mass demands (and 
commands — this an essential feature in any morality) that all 
individuals shall serve the group, shall be good according to its 
understanding of the term and avoid evil as it conceives it, that 
none shall have separate standards, personal aims, or will to 
power on their own account — it fears any one who takes things 
into his own hands and opposes him (naturally loving those who 
love it, and do its will). But this is only saying that the mass 
"Ibid., §§720, 1025. 



364 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

wishes to prevail (have supreme power), prevail with its moral- 
ity and by its morality — for it is not merely a question of 
physical force. And how far the instincts and desires of the 
mass have prevailed is indicated in the very fact that makes the 
starting-point of this paragraph — they have actually succeeded 
in identifying morality with their morality and have made the 
idea go into current thought and speech that morality and power 
are antithetical things. But the power to which "morality" is 
antithetical is only the power of strong men who make their 
own laws of conduct (persons proper) ; morality itself is will 
to power — only it is the will of the weaker sort of men and of 
a sort, which takes easily, as the weaker, to deception (conscious 
or unconscious). In other words, the historical antagonism of 
morality to will to power roots itself in the antagonism of the 
mass to higher individuals, of the average to the exceptions, of 
the weak to the strong. Occasionally Nietzsche turns the tables 
on morality, saying that it is itself unmoral — meaning accord- 
ing to its own specious antithesis of morality to will to power ; 
for it is itself an assertion of will to power. 42 

In fact, he finds will to power in varying degrees practically 
everywhere — though it assumes different forms and sometimes 
hides itself. It often exists in the sickly as truly as in the well — 
none can surpass, for instance, a feeble, sickly woman in refined 
ways of ruling, oppressing, tyrannizing. 43 Indeed, so many and 
such varying wills to power are described by Nietzsche that one 
is sometimes led to ask whether power and will to power make 
any kind of a standard to him. As he reads history and par- 
ticularly modern history, the instinct for power of the mass has 
actually triumphed over great individuals (or those who might 
have been such) — a result so deplorable and pitiful in his eyes 
that one might parody his state of mind by saying that his 
appeal is to "come to the help of the mighty against the weak"! 
■ — and yet a result, to which as a triumph of power his own 
principles would seem to oblige him to assent. Our perplexity 
and confusion are only resolved (so far as they are resolved g ) 

42 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 274, 401, 461, 720, 721, and Dolson's happy 
explanatory statement, as against Hollitscher's Friedrich Nietzsche, in 
the Philosophical Review, May, 1905, p. 373. Even the Greeks had not 
the courage [insight?] to transcend the antithesis [Will to Power, §428). 

43 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 14. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 365 

as we remember that there are different grades or levels of 
power to his mind, and above all that he is always thinking of 
the individual specimen of humanity, the type. The mass, by 
combining, undoubtedly make themselves stronger than the 
"strong," but they are none the less poorer, feebler specimens 
of our kind. 44 h 

(3) Two or three further instances of Nietzsche's fixing 
rank according to power may be cited. The morality of men 
like Heraclitus and Plato is something very different from the 
morality of subjection such as is practised by the ordinary 
members of society. It is the morality of those who would nat- 
urally have ruled in society, but who in a time of change and 
dissolution can only rule themselves. 45 The ranking in this case 
is indeed hardly different from that which most of us would 
instinctively make. Our ordinary judgments, too, of vanity, 
hypocrisy, and mere prudence seem to rest on the basis of a 
standard like Nietzsche's. Why do We look down on a vain 
person? Because he wants to please, to be what others would 
like, in this showing a lack of original creative force — he is 
"empty." We judge an unreal, hypocritical person in the same 
way — the contemptible thing about him is his exceeding defer- 
ence to the standards of others. So the typically prudent person 
is not set on high, because something is lacking in him — the 
abounding energy that sometimes makes one headlong, frank, 
defiant to one's cost. On the other hand, love and unselfishness 
suggest one who overflows in power, and the very counting of 
costs that ranks low, when it is a dictate of prudence, wins an 
altogether different estimation when a great love, e.g., love for 
the community, lies back of it. 46 

Nietzsche appears to have had in mind a systematic classi- 
fication of men and things according to the following schema: 

" What springs from strength. 
What springs from weakness. 
And whence have we sprung? 
The great choice." 4T 

44 As to the supreme significance of the individual specimen, see Will 
to Power, §§ 679-82, 713, and Simmel's remarks, op. cit., pp. 206-10. 

45 Werke, XI, 251, § 221. 
"Ibid., XIII, 177-8, §406. 
47 Ibid., XVI, 434. 



366 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

Though he never accomplished the classification, it has been 
attempted in a most interesting way by Professor Kichter, who 
makes a survey and hypothetical valuation of varying religions, 
philosophies, moralities, types of art, personalities, and cultures, 
from this point of view. 48 



But now let us attend a little more closely to what Nietzsche 
means by power. He makes no formal definition of it, 1 and 
does not attempt to say what is its final metaphysical nature. 1 
He appears to take the concept simply as he finds it in common 
use — the essential element being ascendency, effectual superi- 
ority of some sort. By giving it an inner turn, taking it prac- 
tically as will to power, he indicates that it is not anything static 
that he has in mind, but a principle of movement and progress 
(or at least change). The implication is that there is no result 
that does not tend to be transcended, perhaps destroyed. 
''Whatever I create and however much I love it, I have soon to 
be hostile to it," says Zarathustra. 49 Power, at least will to 
power, is eternally avid. k Hence successive grades or levels of 
power, a Rangordnung. It is from inattention to this that 
Nietzsche is much misconceived — as if "power" must always 
be on a physical level! Emerson speaks of a "scale of 
powers ; " 50 Nietzsche 's idea is the same. Emerson advances the 
paradoxical idea that it is "not talent but sensibility which is 
the best, ' ' and Nietzsche finds power in things which are often 
contrasted with it. But the higher sorts of power, though so 
different from the lower that they seem antithetical and a part 
of another order of reality, are really extensions, refinements, 
spiritualizations of the lower sorts, and have the same essential 
character. 1 They too give predominance, ascendency, though, 
in other ways, by different means. Indeed, it would seem to 
go along with the general view that the refinements, spiritual- 
izations of power should be just intensifications of it — since 
only on this basis can their ascendency over the grosser forms 
be explained." 1 

Nietzsche gives us no set scale of powers, and I can only 

48 Op. cit., pp. 240-54. 48 Zarathustra, II, xii. 

50 " Success," in Society and Solitude. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 367 

offer more or less vague and scattering illustrations of the gen- 
eral idea that appears to be in his mind. First, he recognizes 
power on the physical or rather animal level. 51 He does this 
so frankly that he has given great offense. Who has not heard 
of the " blond beast roving greedily after prey and victory," 
whom he is supposed to celebrate? Indeed, "blond beast," 
"superman," and other striking phrases have become catch- 
words, most of those who use them having scarcely an idea of 
what Nietzsche meant by them. As a matter of fact, the phrase 
"blond beast" occurs just twice, so far as I remember, in Nietz- 
sche's sixteen-volumed works — the important passage being 
§ 11 of the First Essay of Genealogy of Morals, the other, which 
puts the phrase in quotation marks, being § 2 of a chapter of 
the later Twilight of the Idols, entitled "The 'Improvers' of 
Mankind. ' ' 52 The connection in which the phrase stands in the 
principal passage is something like this: — Nietzsche is continu- 
ing his earlier discussions of the natural history of morals (in 
essentially the same spirit, I may say, as our English and Amer- 
ican anthropologists and sociologists, though perhaps in a finer, 
more intimate, or at least more venturesome way), and now is 
giving his view of the contrasted types of morality which con- 
quering and subject classes naturally develope. By way of illus- 
tration he draws a more or less imaginative picture of the earliest 
Aryan races as they from time to time descended on the aborig- 
inal inhabitants of Europe, and, with all manner of violence, 
reduced them to subjection. 53 Whether Hellenic, Roman, Ger- 
manic, Scandinavian, these marauding tribes were of a common 
fair or blond type (in this Nietzsche simply follows the prevail- 
ing anthropological view) ; to quote his words, "at the basis of 
all these superior races, the robber-animal is not to be mistaken, 
the splendid blond beast roving greedily after prey and vic- 

51 It should be said that the predominance he recognizes is always 
that of body and soul; in speaking of the robber-type which lies at the 
basis of aristocratic societies, he says, " its superiority lay not primarily 
in physical force, but in force of soul — they were the more complete men " 
{Beyond Good and Evil, § 257). 

52 1 do not mean that an equivalent expression does not sometimes 
occur — e.g., in Genealogy etc., II, § 17 ("a troop of blond robber-animals "). 

58 With this passage may be compared the description of the memorials 
of the founding of states to be discerned everywhere — lands laid waste, 
towns destroyed, men made wild, consuming hatred between peoples, in 
Werke, IX, 155. 



368 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

tory." It is simply a pictorial, but perhaps for all that quite 
exact description of our distant Aryan forefathers. In the 
other passage, superior (vornehme) Germans of the early 
Middle Ages are spoken of as fine examples of the ''blond 
beast. ' ' 

Undoubtedly Nietzsche in a certain sense " celebrates " 
these conquering Aryans. Many of us too are proud of our 
descent from them, though Nietzsche undermines our feeling 
somewhat by suggesting that the blood of most of us is probably 
much mixed. Relatively to those whom they conquered they 
were the more vigorous stock and had the higher promise of 
life — even supposing that the subjected populations were more 
industrious, more peaceful, more moral (in the sense in which 
morality stands for sympathy and mutual help). Overflowing 
vitality is the condition of all that is really excellent in Nietz- 
sche 's estimation. Not in lessening or depressing this, but in 
refining and spiritualizing it is the way of progress. But it does 
not follow that those in whom vitality has risen to higher and 
finer forms shall make the ''blond beast" (in his early form) 
their model and shall go back to marauding and killing as our 
fathers did. We may indeed do it on occasion, or something 
like it — modern European states are doing it in their colonial 
ventures, 54 though even so the work might be done in a finer and 
less bungling manner. But in general it is no more necessary 
that power shall always remain on the animal level than that 
a grown-up man shall repeat the exuberances of his youth, and 
it is gratuitious to imagine that Nietzsche proposes any such 
thing. All. the same, this seems to be the ordinary interpreta- 
tion of Nietzsche, and it is sometimes shared by those from whom 
one expects more discriminating judgments — professional 
scholars and philosophers." Among the few to discriminate 
are Professor Riehl, Professor Rene Berthelot, and Professor 
Frank Thilly. While as against weakness, stagnation, or de- 
generation, with whatever accompaniment of refined feelings 
and peaceful manners, the "blond beast," the primitive Aryan, 
was the better man and had more promise for the race, this is 
not true when the contrast is with a higher, more spiritual de- 
velopment of the same forces that were in him. Emerson speaks 
84 Cf. Werke, XIII, 326, § 797. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 369 

in the same spirit, when he says, "In politics and in trade, 
bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and 
clerks"; and again, "In a good lord there must first be a good 
animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparable ad- 
vantage of animal spirits. ' ' p Most valuations are relative, some 
things are better than other things (though still other things 
may be better than these) — and there is no need, nor is it cor- 
rect, to attribute absolute valuations at this particular point to 
Nietzsche. Q The extent to which Nietzsche attached finer and 
higher meanings to power than mere brute force will appear as 
I go on. 

But before doing so a word should be said as to what Nietz- 
sche regards as the democratic misunderstanding of will to 
power, namely the identification of it with ambition, love of 
glory. Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander are often cited as instances 
— as if, says Nietzsche, just these men were not despisers of 
glory. 55 Glory is, of course, honor in the eyes of others, it is 
distinctively a craving of the social man (i.e., of one who is not 
sufficient unto himself) ; the desire for it is akin to vanity and 
springs from weakness. 56 But it was not the notice of others 
that these men sought — power itself was what they were after 
and this is one of the reasons why they rank so high. He also 
criticises the view of Helvetius that one strives for power in 
order to get the pleasures that are at the command of the pow- 
erful 57 — this, I might say, as many of our wealthy (or becoming- 
wealthy) class in America do, enjoyments, luxuries, comfort 
being in the background of their mind. But this is to confuse 
the strong man with enjoyment-seekers — what such an one really 
wishes is to put forth his power, not to eat sweets, have country 
houses, live softly, and so on. 58 As Nietzsche conceives aris- 
tocracy, even the idea of it scarcely exists in America. 

Nor is Nietzsche's "strong man" a swashbuckler. That 
this is not what he means is implied in a remark he makes (per- 

55 Will to Power, § 751. 

59 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 261 (there is nothing harder for a 
really superior man to understand than vanity). 

67 Will to Power, § 751. 

68 Cf. Werke, XIII, 177, § 405 (happiness is not the aim, but feeling 
of power). Happiness is an indeterminate conception anyway: "not 
1 happiness follows virtue,' but the strong man fixes his happy state as 
virtue" (Will to Power, § 1026). 



370 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

haps unjustly) about present-day Germans. They think, he 
says, ' ' that force must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and 
then they subject themselves gladly and admiringly. . . . That 
there is force in mildness and quietness they do not readily be- 
lieve. They miss force in Goethe and think that Beethoven has 
more; and in this they err/' 59 Again he says, "When one sits 
well on a horse he steals an enemy's courage and an onlooker's 
heart — why wilt thou still attack ? Sit like a conquering one ! " 60 
Moreover, power by no means necessarily intimidates, he thinks, 
and when punishment is attempted with this sole end in view 
it is often a sign that real power is lacking — a sign of doubt 
of one's power. Indeed, Nietzsche's idea of a natural lord of 
men is often not of an oppressor at all, but of one who brings 
relief, benefit. 61 He is one "who can lead a cause, carry out a 
resolve, be loyal to an idea, hold fast a woman, punish and 
overthrow a rascal — a man who has his anger and his sword 
and to whom the weak and suffering and oppressed, and even 
animals gladly turn and naturally belong." 62 His thought of 
the future is that the European masses who are now being 
mixed, averaged, democratized, will sooner or later need a 
strong man as they need their daily bread. 63 M. Faguet over- 
looks this side of the matter when he represents Nietzsche as 
teaching that the higher class are to hold down the mass and 
keep them at their tasks by force. 64 The summit of power, in 
his conception, is just in making that cruder sort of power 
unnecessary. If we use violence against another, we may of 
course subject him, but we do not get his heart — and therefore 
our power over him is so far incomplete. 65 It reminds one of 
what Lorenzo de' Medici said after foiling the Pitti conspiracy 

s °Werke, XI, 363-4, §543. Cf. another remark, "I have found force 
where one does not look for it, in simple, mild, and agreeable men who 
have not the slightest desire to rule " — his idea being that strong natures 
rule anyway, even if (as he says) they do not lift a finger and during 
their whole life bury themselves in a garden. 

60 Mixed Opinions etc., § 354. 

61 Beyond Good and Evil, § 199. 
82 Ibid., § 293. 

63 Ibid., § 242. 

64 En lisant Nietzsche, p. 344 ff. Faguet does, however, admit that 
the force is not brutality, or at least brutal manners, for he says that in 
Nietzsche's dream of a superhuman elite, who will deliberately conquer 
and oppress, he always makes beautiful manners enter (p. 307). 

85 Will to Power, § 769. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 371 

against his house, "He only knows how to conquer, who knows 
how to forgive/' 66 

Indeed, as we have already seen, power takes to Nietzsche's 
mind a new turn in the human world in general. Man passes 
as the strongest animal — but why? Because, Nietzsche an- 
swers, he is the cunningest. Intelligence is power along the 
human line of evolution. In the progress of mankind, ever less 
physical force is necessary; as time goes on, we wisely let ma- 
chines work, man becomes stronger and more spiritual. 67 Once 
in speaking of the greatest events and the greatest thoughts, 
he corrects himself: "but the greatest thoughts are the greatest 
events." 68 He even allows Zarathustra to say, "thoughts that 
come with the feet of doves rule the world," and he gives as 
an instance the thought of good and evil : Zarathustra had seen 
many lands and peoples and had found no greater power on 
earth than this category. 69 For what is thinking or knowing? 
At bottom and in its most commonplace form, it is to Nietzsche 
a kind of grasping of things to the end of getting control over 
them, making an idea and orderly scheme of them to the end 
of control — the senses, memory, all develope in this way : behind 
the whole process is the instinct for power. Philosophy (as 
distinguished from ordinary thinking) is a more sublimated 
expression of the same instinct ; and it is because the philosopher 
wants the best conditions for expanding his force and reaching 
a maximum of power, that he renounces on occasion the de- 
lights of other men, such as home, children, family-ties, even 
verging towards ascetic ideas. 70 And the difference between the 
mere skeptic or critic or historian in philosophy and real phi- 
losophers, i.e., constructive, creative thinkers, is a difference in 
power. The former can think to the extent of doubting or 
analyzing or describing but are incapable of more, while the 
latter are capable and from the fullness and overflow of their 

66 Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, p. 87. Cf. what Csesar said, in 
letting his enemies of Pompey's party go free after they had fallen into 
his hands : " I will conquer after a new fashion and fortify myself in the 
possession of the power I acquire, by generosity and mercy." 

67 Will to Power, §856; cf. §544; The Antichristian, §14; Werke, 
XIV, 97, § 207. 

88 Beyond Good and Evil, § 285. 
69 Zarathustra, II, xxii; I, xv. 
10 Beyond Good and Evil, §9; Genealogy etc., Ill, §7. 



372 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

energy do creative work. 71 Equally with the robber, the 
barbarian, and adventurer is the philosophic innovator after 
power, only it is the supreme kind of power not the lesser. 72 
Nietzsche speaks of the calling of the philosopher as a kingly 
one; he cites Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon's definition of it, prava 
corrigere et recta corroborare et sancta sublimare (to correct 
what is wicked, to strengthen what is right, and to lift what is 
sacred on high). 73 There is something of the Caesar in the 
philosopher's nature — Nietzsche speaks of the " Caesarian 
trainer and strong man of culture" ; and he thinks that the type 
of philosopher needed in the future will be bred in a caste 
accustomed to rule and will be its highest spiritualization. 74 
For the function of the philosopher is pre-eminently to be a 
lawgiver, not merely to define and name the valuations that 
are, 75 but to say what ought to be, to give an end and an aim 
to mankind, to turn what is and was into means, instruments, 
hammer for forging the future — his knowing is creating, his 
creating law-giving, his will to truth will to power. 76 Beyond 
the actual rulers concerned with the administration of govern- 
ment and in a state apart, is this highest man — a power above 
powers, determining the values and guiding the will of cen- 
turies. 77 

Nietzsche also speaks of power on the moral level. What is 
the difference between vulgar selfishness (which Nietzsche looks 
down upon as much as any one), and the love that looks beyond 
oneself and gives and bestows? It is, according to his view, 
that the selfish man requires all his energy for his own ends 
and has no surplus — he is really a needy kind of man who must 

71 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §210; Will to Power, §972. 

72 Will to Power, § 779. 

73 Ibid., § 977. 

74 Ibid., § 978; cf. § 960, and Beyond Good and Evil, § 213. 

78 Cf. Will to Power, § 422, as to the contrast with the purely scientific 
man who now is supreme; even Hegel made the philosopher subject to 
reality — he prepares for it, nothing more. 

76 Will to Power, § 972; Beyond Good and Evil, § 211. 

77 Will to Power, §§ 998-9. Somewhat in the same spirit Nietzsche 
ranks the church as an institution higher than the state, i.e., because it 
gives to the spiritual type of men the supreme place and has such con- 
fidence in the power of spirituality (Geistigkeit) that it renounces the 
use of rude force {Joyful Science, §358). So the rule exercised by heads 
of religious orders is spoken of as "the highest kind of ruling" {Beyond 
Good and Evil, § 61 ) . Cf. the striking picture of the Vornehmheit of the 
higher Catholic clergy, Dawn of Day, § 60. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 373 

take in all that he can and cannot afford to give out; while 
the other type overflows. Wherever there is power and to 
spare, it must have an object on which to expend itself, either 
harming or blessing, and "love gives the highest feeling of 
power. ' ' 78 Sometimes this type of goodness is combined with 
greatness and then arises "angelic majesty." It is something 
in which the highest pride bends fatherly and benignly to 
others and has no other idea than to rule and to guard at once — 
something lacking, Nietzsche remarks, "in our political par- 
venus." 79 There is even a kind of prodigality resulting from 
inner opulence. In this way aristocrats sometimes throw away 
their privileges and interest themselves for the people, the 
weak, the poor. 80 Hence too a noble hospitality. "There is a 
superior and dangerous kind of carelessness, . . . that of the 
self-assured and over-rich soul, which has never concerned 
itself about friends and only knows hospitality and how to prac- 
tise it — heart and house open for every one who will come in, 
whether beggar or cripple or king. It is the genuine courtesy 
(Leutseliglceit) : one who has it possesses a hundred 'friends,' 
but probably no friend." 81 In a similar way grace, or -merciful 
indulgence, is the virtue, the privilege, of the strong — and can 
only be exercised by them. As we have already seen, Nietzsche 
can even imagine a society so strong and so self-assured that 
it could let wrongdoers go unpunished 82 — something, I need not 
say, that does not hold for the societies of today. 

Nietzsche sees power lying back of self-control. Why is it 
that some always follow immediate impulses? Because, he says 
in effect, they lack power to inhibit them. 83 They have the 
power of their impulses, but no surplus, nothing transcending. 
It is only the strong man with heaped-up force, who can say 
"no" to this and that wandering desire — who can rule them, 
give them their proper place and no more, and thus make a 

78 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 18; Will to Power, § 176. 

79 Werke, XI, 367, § 554. 

80 Will to Power, §§935, 938; from another point of view conduct of 
this sort is questionable (Beyond Good and Evil, §258). 

81 Will to Power, §939. 

82 Genealogy etc., II, § 10; The Wanderer etc., §34. 

88 Twilight etc., viii, §6; Will to Poicer, §778; Werke, XII, 9, §14; 
cf. August Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche, und Naturalismus, pp. 157, 
166. 



874 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

harmony, instead of a discord and contradiction, of his inner 
life. "Unfree will" is defined as defect in inhibitory power 
against stimuli; 84 with power comes free-will (in the legitimate 
sense of that phrase). Libertinism, laisser alter, is not power, 
but the antithesis of it: whether practised by an individual in 
relation to his impulses, or by society in relation to the mass of 
its members, it is symptomatic of weakness and degeneration-*— 
strength is ever in rule, in organization. 85 The decadents of our 
or any time find their definition (in part) as those who cannot 
control themselves — this is the meaning of their irritability : all 
predominantly irritable people belong to the descending line of 
life — they are impulse merely, have no surplus strength. 86 This 
holds of the sexual as of other instincts — one who does not have 
them under control is not a strong man; the artist, Nietzsche 
holds, is a temperate, often a chaste man, his dominating 
instinct making him so — one of the regular symptoms of ex- 
hausted stock is inability not to respond to the slightest sexual 
stimulus. 87 Once he speaks of the necessity on occasion of fight- 
ing, even knocking out of their senses, impulses, though they 
are not on that account to be called evil, but only to be 
downed, made subservient — for power over, not destruction of, 
the passions is the true aim. 88 The body does best itself when it 
is best ruled 89 — and the underlying truth is a general one; 
power is organized and attains its maximum of efficiency and 
happiness, when higher, stronger power directs it. For culture 
as for war we need "great leaders, and all education begins 

84 Will to Power, § 1020. 

85 Ibid., § 122. Cf. the reflection on those whose bad impulses thirst 
for freedom, whose wild dogs want liberty, Zarathustra, I, viii. Contrary 
to his usual custom, libertinism of the intellect is once spoken of without 
disparagement (ibid., §120), but the thought is much the same as that 
underlying his use of the assassin-motto, "Nothing is true, everything 
is permitted" (see supra, pp. 320, 336). 

86 Will to Power, § 737. 

61 Ibid., §§815, 934; cf. Werke, XIV, 273, §58, and views of his 
earlier period as cited, supra, p. 125. Yet Paul Carus can say: " Nietzsche 
knows nothing of self-control ; " he " made himself the advocate of vice 
and gloried in it; " among the thoughts of George Moore which he might 
have written is, "I boasted of dissipation" (op. cit., pp. 34, 61, 104). 
Even The Nation (New York, February 22, 1912) speaks of his denying 
" the validity of any check within ourselves contrary to the primitive 
instincts and impulses of nature." It is the general ignorance. 

88 Dawn of Day, § 76; Will to Power, § 933. 

89 Werke, XIV, 81, § 161. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 375 

with obedience/ ' What Nietzsche calls Zilchtung (training, 
discipline) he ranks high for this reason: it increases strength — 
untrained men being weak, wasteful, inconstant. 90 He even 
sees the higher meaning of asceticism from this point of 
view, however hostile he is to it in other ways. 91 Why did a 
mediaeval baron on occasion bow before a saint — not merely one 
of the Franciscan type, but the sterner sort as well, above all 
one of the sterner sort? Because, Nietzsche answers, however 
strong his own will to power, he recognized in the saint a 
kindred will to power, though taking a different turn. 92 The 
baron conquered others, the saint conquered himself, laid a 
strong hand on the natural impulses welling up in him — and 
the baron might well ask from his own experience, which was 
the greater victory and showed the greater power? Nietzsche 
says that the feeling of power has hitherto reached its highest 
point in continent priests and hermits (for example, among the 
Brahmans) , 93 Further, it is possible not only to control "natural 
impulses"; we can triumph over suffering and pain. Nietzsche 
uses the word "tyrannize" on one occasion. A measure of the 
power of the will is how much opposition, pain, torture it can 
bear and turn to account. 94 It is one of the characteristic 
marks of the most spiritual, i.e., strongest, men, the great indi- 
viduals on whom Nietzsche sets his heart, that they practise 
hardness against themselves: "it is their pleasure to subdue 
themselves, asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct with 
them." 95 

Indeed, virtue in general finds its definition with Nietzsche 
in terms of strength — and after all this is only returning to 
ancient usage. Virtue for him is literally virtus, apBtrf, Italian 
Renaissance virtu, i.e., strong excellence of some sort, manly 

90 Will to Power, § 398. Yet John Dewey speaks of Nietzsche as "a» 
rebel against any philosophy of regimentation and subordination" {At-\ 
lantic Monthly, February, 1916, p. 254). 

9 ' He devotes one of the Essays of Genealogy of Morals to the ques- 
tion, "What do Ascetic Ideals signify?" 

92 Beyond Good and Evil, § 51. 

93 Werke, XI, 253, § 229 (he remarks here that the reabsorption of 
the semen into the blood makes the strongest nourishment, and stimulates 
to an extraordinary degree the impulse for mastery, as also the craving 
for something contradictory and opposed on which the impulse may 
expend itself). 

9 * Dawn of Day, § 113; Will to Power, §382. 
08 The Antichristian, § 57. 



376 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

superiority. Underlying it is will, courage — its opposite is lazi- 
ness, weakness, fear. Many, he says, do not put through their 
best right, because a right is a sort of power and they are too 
lazy or too afraid to exercise power — decorating then their 
fault perhaps by talking of forbearance and patience. 96 Power, 
as Nietzsche uses the term, includes will to power, and the 
trouble with many is that they don't will — they long, they 
desire, they are ambitious, but they do not will. 97 Willing is 
saying, So let it be : it is a kind of commanding. 98 Hence Zara- 
thustra 's warning, "Do what you will, but first be such as can 
will."™ It is, in Nietzsche's eyes, a trouble with the Germans, 
that they know how to obey, but not to command, though in 
exceptional circumstances they may do it. 100 In general, the 
greatest danger for man is not in the qualities that belong to 
the robber-animal, but in sickliness, weakness. 101 This makes 
virtue proper impossible. Vice, on the other hand, is the self- 
indulgence of the weak, their inability to inhibit impulse. 102 I do 
not mean that Nietzsche counts as virtue everything that goes 
by that name — he will first have it proved that "virtues" are 
virtue, i.e., come from strength, 103 and in effect suggests a re- 
estimation of them, according to the nature of their source. So 
vices are regarded as manifestations of weakness. It is even 
possible that what is vice for a weak man should be a permissible 
liberty to another. 

The intimate connection of virtue with power Nietzsche im- 
plies in another connection. It is, he says, "in order that the 

j 98 The Wanderer etc., § 251. A virtue is properly something strong 
and individual, characterizing above all the exceptional man, Will to 
Power, §317. 

07 Nietzsche sharply distinguishes between the two things, Zara- 
thustra, I, xvii. 

98 Beyond Good and Evil, § 19. 

99 Zarathustra, III, v, § 3. 

100 Dawn of Day, § 207. Cf. the contemptuous references to the 
German soul with its involuntary bowing to titles of honor, orders, gracious 
looks from above, etc., Werke, XIII, 344, § 855 ; also, Zarathustra, III, 
vii. Ralph Barton Perry's references in this connection to Nietzsche (The 
Moral Economy) show little acquaintance with him. 

101 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 14; cf. Will to Power, § 98. 

102 Cf. Werke, XIV, 119, §251 (vice, along with sickliness, mental 
derangement and hypernervosity, a symptom of physiological decadence) ; 
Will to Power, § 42 (crime, celibacy, alcoholism, pessimism, anarchism, 
libertinism, social and intellectual, classed along with vice); ibid., §871 
(men of power and will the antithesis of the vicious and unbridled). 

103 Qf., Werke, XIII, 209, § 481. 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 377 

manliest men should rule"; indeed, "there is no sorer misfor- 
tune in all human destiny than when the mighty of the earth are 
not also the first men. 104 And yet, he adds (and this is the 
point now), when the highest kind of men are not in power, 
there is something lacking in the higher men themselves. Not 
only should the best rule, but the best will rule, and where there 
is a different idea, the best are wanting, 105 i.e., it enters into the 
idea of the best that they take the responsibility their nature 
entails ; if they do not, they are not the best. At this point we 
see again how impossible it is to hold that in Nietzsche's view 
any kind of might makes right. If we are occasionally tried 
by passages that look this way r we must remember that to him 
there are different levels of power, 106 that one level may be 
higher than another and yet be lower than one higher still, and 
that the highest kind of power alone had his unmixed admira- 
tion. In any case, the fact that men are "the mighty of the 
earth" nowise decides the question of their worth. Time and 
again he speaks of the degeneration or inadequacy of matter-of- 
fact rulers and ruling classes. 107 I have already indicated his 
view of the German Empire. Even in Napoleon, a far greater 
man in his estimation than any German of the political order, 
he saw defects — Napoleon was compromised by the means he 
had to use. 108 Of certain Roman Emperors he says: "without 
them and the [degenerate] Roman society [of that time], Chris- 
tianity would not have come to power. . . . When Nero and 
Caracalla sat on the throne, the paradox arose that the lowest 
man was worth more than the man on top. ' ' 109 And something- 
of this sort may always happen. Now the corrupt ruling classes 
are spoiling the image of the ruler in the minds of men, and 
many want no ruler. 110 "Often slime sits on the throne, and 
the throne on slime." 111 All the same, the failure of previous 

104 Werke, XIII, 347, § 859; Zarathustra, IV, iii, § 1. 
io 6 Werke, XIV, 65, § 128; Zarathustra, III, xii, § 21. 

106 Cf. Werke, XIV, 64, § 125. 

107 Cf., for example, Werke, XIV, 340, § 191; Will to Power, § 874. 

108 Cf. Werke, XIV, 65, § 129; Will to Power, § 1026. 

10 ° Will to Poicer, § 874. Chatterton-Hill overlooks this passage in 
reasoning that Nietzsche "must have been an admirer of Nero" {op. cit., 
pp. 67-8). 

110 Ibid., § 750. 

111 Zarathustra, I, xi. At best princes today are in danger of becom- 
ing "solemn nothings" {Dawn of Day, §526). 



378 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

aristocracies, temporal and spiritual, proves nothing against 
the necessity of a new aristocracy. 112 And when the best come 
once more, the apifftoi, best in body, mind, and soul, they will 
rule again. And that Nietzsche has an ideal in mind and does 
not bow down before brute actuality now any more than when 
he wrote "On the Use and Harm of History for Life" in 1873, 113 
is shown in no way more clearly than by the fact that the 
supreme specimens of power to which his faith and longing went 
out, do not exist now (though power of some description rules 
the world now as truly as ever), but belong to the future, the 
function of present humanity being above all to make their 
advent possible. 

We may accept Nietzsche's moral aim and his practical 
identification of it with will to power, or we may not: it is a 
matter for our own critical judgment and choice. I have only 
sought to make his views as clear as their somewhat uncertain 
nature would allow. And perhaps I should append his own 
remark that it is part of the humanity of a teacher to warn his 
pupils against him. 11 * 

VI 

If a name is desired for Nietzsche's general ethical view, I 
know of none better than one used occasionally by Professor 
Simmel: Personalism. 115 Utilitarianism on a pleasure and pain 
basis, no matter how universalistically conceived, Nietzsche dis- 
tinctly rejects. "Egoism" is misleading; the egoism of the mass 
of/ men is no ideal to him, and that of the degenerate sickens, 
"stinkt." m "Individualism" is equally objectionable. Nietz- 
sche conducts a polemic against individualism: he does not 
think that each and every man is important on his own account, 
that all have equal rights, that progress consists in making indi- 
viduals as free as possible from social control, that each should 
live out his own life and pursue happiness in his own way. 117 

112 Will to Power, § 953. 

113 See particularly sects. 8 and 9 of that noteworthy essay. 

114 Dawn of Day, § 447. 

115 Cf. op. cit., p. 242. The title which Simmel specially chooses is, 
however, " Die Moral der Vornehmheit" (" Vornehrnheit " covering the 
distinctive characteristics of the " Vomehmen " or superior class ) . 

118 Cf. supra, p. 347. 

117 Cf. Zarathustra's language: " Callest thou thyself free? Thy 



THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER 379 

An ideal like this verges on anarchy, and Nietzsche is not a 
friend of anarchy. He thinks that some people are more im- 
portant than others, that, as Professor Karl Pearson has re- 
cently put it, "one able leader, one inspirer or controller of 
men is worth to the race thousands of every-day workers, ' ' us 
or, in Heraclitus's language, that, "one man is equal to ten 
thousand, if he be the best." In other words, there are grada- 
tions of rank among men, and it is a caste society that makes 
his idea — "my philosophy is directed to an order of rank 
(Rangordnung) , not to an individualistic morality." 119 But 
"Personalism," though like any general term it lacks complete 
definiteness, comes nearer to describing his thought than any 
other single word I know of. For to Nietzsche persons are the 
summit of human evolution, and the creation or furthering of 
them is the highest end which men can now propose to them- 
selves — persons being those who direct themselves and make 
their own law, the strong, complete, final specimens of our kind 
who naturally rule the rest of us, or, if they do not rule, make 
a semi-divine race above us. I shall try to show in some detail 
what Nietzsche means by persons in the following chapter. 

ruling thought would I hear and not that thou hast escaped a yoke. Art 
thou one who dare escape a yoke? Many a man has cast aside his last 
worth, when he cast aside his servitude" (Zarathustra, I, xvii). 

118 In an address on Sir Francis Galton. 

119 Will to Power, §§ 854, 287. Cf. the general attack on individualism, 
ibid., §§ 782-4, 859, and Simmel's thoroughgoing treatment of the subject, 
op. cit., pp. 206-11. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

MORAL CONSTRUCTION (Coot.). "PERSONS," OR GREAT 

MEN 



"Persons," in the distinctive sense in which Nietzsche uses the 
term, are a development in human society and do not belong to 
its beginnings — save in rudimentary form as rulers or leaders 
of the flock. Most men are not persons now. The fundamental 
thing in human nature is sociality and social functioning — at 
least since man ceased to be a roving lawless animal. Indi- 
viduals are first parts of a whole — they come to exist for them- 
selves late and rarely. They even tend to be like one another, 
as sheep in a flock do — some sociologists put imitation at the 
basis of the social process. Indeed, the wonder is, considering 
the circumstances of men's origin, that persons ever arise. 
Morality itself (the mores of a group) operates to make men 
alike — this is perhaps its unconscious purpose, to the end that 
surprises may be minimized and all feel as secure as possible. 
Now, as in the past, the more the feeling of unity predominates, 
the more individuals become uniform — and differences are felt 
as immoral. 1 Zarathustra says, "You were once apes, and even 
yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes. ' ' 2 Language, 
a supposed distinguishing mark of man, after all covers only 
what is communicable, common — words fail for our strictly par- 
ticular, individual experiences. 3 The world about us — that 
which we so call — is what we all see alike : the rarer, personal, 
perceptions scarcely belong to it. 'Even "truth" is a matter 
of agreement : what one thinks is set down as individual simply, 
what two or more agree in thinking — that is "true." 4 Our 
very mind is largely a social product; what others teach us, 
wish of us, tell us to fear or to follow, makes up the original 

1 Werke, XI, 237, § 193. 3 Tiuilight etc., ix, § 26. 

2 Zarathustra, prologue, §3. * Joyful Science, §260; cf. §228. 

380 



" PERSONS/' OR GREAT MEN 381 

content of it; we get even our idea of ourselves from others, 
and the way we judge ourselves only continues the combined 
judgment of others. 5 In other words, human beings in society 
tend to be standardized, averaged; "so arises necessarily the 
sand of humanity, all very like one another, very small, very 
round, very peaceable, very tiresome/ ' 6 Indeed, since society 
is a prime condition of existence for the human animal, it must 
be admitted that when survival for a given society depends on 
the preponderance of certain average characteristics in it, per- 
sons are a kind of waste, a luxury, and wishing for them has 
no sense. 7 What would be the use of a sheep's becoming a 
person, or an ant's? Its whole function (unless it is a leader 
of the flock or community) is to be the scarcely distinguishable 
unit of the mass that it is and to continue the type. 

ii 

And yet persons do occasionally arise in human society — at 
least there are attempts in that direction. How does it happen ? 
Nietzsche thinks in the first place that for all that may be said 
of the socializing, standardizing process, each human being is 
at bottom in some way peculiar. Schopenhauer had held that, 
while among the lower orders of being there was no essential 
difference between individuals, the species alone being particular 
and peculiar, each man is himself a "particular idea," "an 
altogether peculiar idea"; and Nietzsche, at least for a time, 
followed him. 8 Never did he believe that men were born free 
and equal, but he recognized that they were born different. 
"The habit of seeing resemblances, of finding things the same 
is a mark of weak eyes." This is said in commenting on the 
effort often made to harmonize contrasted thinkers — which only 
shows, he adds, that one has not the eye for what happens but 
once, and stamps one as mediocre. 9 But it holds, in his view, of 

6 Werke, XI, 236, § 191 ; cf. Dawn of Day, § 105. 

6 Werke, XI, 237, § 193. 

7 Will to Power, § 886. 

8 Cf . Human, etc., § 286. Perhaps I should say " always." In Joyful 
Science he still calls it the goal that " every one should draw his pattern 
of life and realize it — his individual pattern," and says that his kind of 
ethics would ever more and more take from man his general character 
and specialize him. 

9 Joyful Science, § 228. 



382 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

our dealing with men in general. We put them all together, 
leave out of account their differences, and then we call them a 
species! The individuals, however, are more real than the 
species — the latter is an abstraction, a more or less artificial 
thing. But if individuals do really differ, why is it that they 
do not act accordingly, and instead fall to imitating one an- 
other? The reason is partly, as already explained, the social 
strait- jacket, the pressure of social necessity, but partly also, 
as Nietzsche thinks, lack of force in individuals themselves. 
They are afraid, lazy, deficient in energy. "When the great 
thinker despises men,'' he says, "he despises their laziness 
(Faulheit), on which account they have the look of factory 
products. The man who does not wish to be merely one of the 
mass, only needs to cease to be easy with himself. " 10 It is the 
few possessing the surplus vitality and courage that makes them 
leaders and rulers, who become anywise persons in primitive 
times. How it happens that while "many are called, few are 
chosen, ' ' I need not now seek to explain — it is a wide and general 
problem, and nowise peculiar to Nietzsche's set of ideas. a The 
many, however, are not for nought, since even if not persons, 
they carry on the stream of life from which now and then 
persons emerge. 

Further, societies may be likened to storehouses of energy 
in which power is gathered and heaped up to a degree that 
would not be possible if men lived singly — this is the ultimate 
justification for the restraints put on individuals in them, for 
rigidly subjecting them to custom and law. But there comes 
a time in a given society when this accumulation, long quietly 
going on, reaches its maximum, and the society acquires at last 
a certain maturity and ripeness. The necessities under which 
it lived in precarious earlier epochs hold now in less degree. 
Individuals who, even if they had willed to be self-acting per- 
sons, could not have been allowed to be, may now be given 
liberty with less danger; indeed, the power that has been ac- 
cumulating in the social storehouse presses for a vent and almost 
of necessity pours out through special channels of this descrip- 

10 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 1. During his middle period, 
marked by a reaction against the cult of " genius," Nietzsche even 
inclined to the view that great men became so by their own efforts (see 
Human, etc., § 163). 






" persons;' or great men sss 

tion. All of which is equivalent to saying that men of inde- 
pendent force and character, individuals capable of self- 
direction, tend to appear. This is Nietzsche's second point of 
view. The material for persons might be said to exist always, 
but actually they only arise under such favorable historical 
conditions as these. b First, social stability; then an aim is pos- 
sible in new and higher directions. 11 When the greatest danger 
for all is over, individual trees can grow with their own special 
conditions of existence. 12 Horticulturists and breeders of ani- 
mals know that with superabundance of nourishment and a 
surplus of care and protection, there is an increased tendency 
to variations and Nietzsche thinks that it is the same with man. 
When there are no longer enemies to guard against, when the 
means of life and enjoyment abound, the old strict discipline 
relaxes, the mores that helped to store surplus power become 
more or less "out of date," and deviations from the average 
type appear such as had not been known before — deviations in 
two directions, indeed, towards what is higher, finer, rarer, 
and also towards what is lower, or even monstrous. If we ob- 
serve Venice after it had attained assured supremacy, or an 
ancient Greek polis like Athens in the fifth century B.C., or the 
end of the Republican period in Rome, 13 we find an essentially 
similar outcome, namely, an astonishing array of marked indi- 
vidualities, some holding themselves together well, others going 
to pieces. 14 It is the harvest time of a people, the raison d'etre 
(in Nietzsche's eyes) of the ages of strict discipline that have 
gone before. Relatively to the old iron-bound order, it is a time 
of anarchy, and, many would say, of corruption (ripeness and 
corruption, we must remember, are not remote from one an- 
other in the temporal order of things) ; but it is also a time 
when the great moral natures appear, not men of the old type 
who simply obey, but men of power — those who in the old order 
would have ruled, but now turn their force inward and rule 
themselves (men like Heraclitus, Plato). 15 

"Werke, XIV, 261-2, §4. 

12 Ibid., XII, 110, §223; cf. XIII, 187. 

13 Cf., as to Rome, W. Warde Fowler, Social Life in Rome, p. 101. 

14 See the remarkable description, Beyond Good and Evil, §262; cf. 
Joyful Science, § 23; Werke, XIV, 76-8. 

16 Werke, XI, 242, § 201; 251, § 221. 



384, NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

Paradoxically enough (and here is a third point of view, 
one already anticipated), 16 the very restraints of the old regime 
have prepared for the liberty of the new. The unremitting 
discipline of the ancient mores has turned men — some men — into 
beings who can be reckoned on and can reckon on themselves, 
i.e., are responsible. With this they gain respect for themselves, 
confidence in themselves. Especially is this the case with those 
who act as representatives of the group, or who guide it in war 
or in peace. Yet this respect for themselves and confidence in 
themselves lead them sooner or later to think that they need 
not take the law of their conduct from without them, but may 
give it to themselves. They have learned to act greatly on 
others' account, they conclude that they might also do so on 
their own. In short, they become self-acting, self-legislating — 
that is, persons. The collectivity itself has unwittingly educated 
them. The altruism bound up with social organization has 
made this extraordinary, final kind of egoism possible. 17 

in 

And yet the new developments, though less dangerous than 
they would have been at an earlier time, are not without danger. 
The individuals strong in themselves and conscious of their 
strength, may contend with one another and endanger social 
stability. 18 They may also intoxicate others who are not as 
strong as they, and make them lose their heads. 19 But gravest 
of all, they may themselves go to pieces. They are making a 
new venture, and with all their antecedent training may not 
succeed. To direct oneself, to take the law of one's conduct 
into one's own hands, is a perilous thing. Thomas Hill Green 
said, indeed, "It is the very essence of moral duty to be imposed 
by a man on himself, ' ' 20 and Kant conceived of duty in similar 
fashion. But both meant little more than that one takes a com- 
monly recognized moral law and re-enacts it in his own person. 
It is a naivete, however, to imagine that when a man takes law- 

16 See pp. 221-2, 264. 

17 Will to Power, §§ 771, 773; cf. Werke, XII, 110-1, 114-6; Genealogy 
etc., II, § 2. 

18 Werke, XIV, 76. 

19 Joyful Science, § 28. 

20 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 354. 



" PERSONS/' OR GREAT MEN 385 

giving into his own hands, he is going to legislate just as others 
do. He may be different from others, have a different end from 
others, or, with the same end, may see deeper or differently 
as to how to reach it. c To tell a sovereign what law he shall 
give himself is more than a naivete — it is a contradiction. 

" Castilian gentlemen 
Choose not their task, — they choose to do it well," 

says George Eliot in The Spanish Gypsy. But a real sovereign 
chooses his task, as well as the doing of it. He sets himself his 
duty. At least so Nietzsche conceived the matter. The very 
thing that urges the type of individual in question to be a law 
unto himself is the more or less dim sense that he is different 
from others, and needs, in order to serve those particulars in 
which he is different, a different regimen and method of pro- 
cedure. One who feels that he is one of many, all essentially 
alike, can neither have nor desire to have a peculiar moral law ; 
but he who is conscious of a quantum of being that is unique, 
may feel that he is even lacking in respect where respect is due, 
if he owns only a common law. Rather does he ask, What agrees 
with my conditions of existence ? and he may as reverently bend 
to that duty as any average individual can to his. And yet 
really to find out oneself and the law that will serve it — what 
a task ! 21 Just to the extent that the individual is unique, he 
can get no help from others. Society, or rather societies, know 
(or think they know) themselves, and the kinds of conduct that 
will serve them — hence morality or moralities, all socially im- 
posed laws for social purposes ; but societies know the individual 
so little, that they either fail to consider him (save as they try 
to restrain him or to make him useful), or else they touch 
merely the surface of him — we have already found Nietzsche 
remarking on the unfineness of morality 's prescriptions for indi- 
vidual well-being. 22 Hence when men take themselves in hand 
and attempt to mark out their own course, they may go astray. 
Nietzsche says that the first tentative individuals generally go 
to pieces. 23 They are great enough to feel the inadequacy of the 
law of the average, but not great enough, or lucky enough to 

21 Cf. Werke, XI, 243, § 203. 22 See ante, p. 216. 

"Werke, XII, 113. 



386 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

find the law that suits them. There is a law for them as truly 
as there is one for society, but they do not hit it — and their 
impulses, still to be trained and unified in the service of the 
new aim, conflict with one another, or, if one gets on top, it sets 
up a tyranny, the others being not so much regulated as 
crushed. 24 Even so, they are fuller, richer, greater than the 
ordinary man; but regulation, organization are lacking and so 
they fail. Nietzsche once drops a despairing remark to the 
effect that man is not yet good enough for a flight in the air, 
out of the reach and criticism of others. He cites as examples 
of higher men who lacked the supreme qualities — strong, rich, 
but without self-control — Byron, Alfred de Musset, Poe, Leo- 
pardi, Heinrich von Kleist, Gogol; he says he could mention 
greater names. He calls men of this type "rudimentary men" 
— that is, they are anticipations, beginnings, in the higher 
direction, but no more. 25 

And yet there are those who do not go to pieces — at least 
sooner or later such appear. They can not only command, they 
can obey — a principle of order and subordination is established 
in them. 26 They represent the opposite of the demoralization 
sometimes produced by freedom — for Zarathustra says, "Alas, 
I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope, and then 
they denied all high hopes; they lived shamelessly in momen- 
tary pleasures and scarcely had aims beyond the day. . . . 
Once they thought to become heroes; now they are voluptu- 
aries ! " 27 They are men able to say Yes, not only in word but 
in deed, to Zarathustra 's challenge, "Canst thou give thyself 
thy evil and thy good, and hang up thy will over thee as a 
law V 28 They not merely know themselves, but they follow a 
still greater injunction, "Will [make] a self" — they give their 
nature a style, mold it, bring it under a law, become masters 
of their wildness, unbridledness, know both how to speak and 
how to keep silent, are capable of hardness and severity against 

24 Cf. ibid., XII, 119, §233; 114, §226. 

25 Beyond Good and Evil, §269; Werke, XII, 119, §233. Nietzsche 
remarks that after seeing the tragedy of these " higher men," we are 
impelled to seek relief and healing in the company of ordinary well- 
conducted people. 

26 Zarathustra, III, xii, §4. 

27 Ibid., I, viii. 

28 Ibid., I, xvii. 



" PERSONS/' OR GREAT MEN 387 

themselves. 29 In short, they are whole men, lawgiver and sub- 
ject in one; they need no laws from without — indeed, "laws," 
"rules" are crude, unfine, compared with the intimate char- 
acter of their self-control. 30 To them and to them only is free- 
dom given without risk ; 31 they are the justification of the 
regime of liberty, even if the other fruit of the social tree spoils 
— better that much should spoil, than that this perfect fruit 
should not appear. Yes, from this fruit new and fairer social 
groupings may in time arise. 

For though Nietzsche's thought wavers at this point, and he 
sometimes speaks as if great men were an end, a consummation 
and not a way to something beyond, his main idea is (to use 
now another metaphor) that they are eggs, germinal begin- 
nings of new societies and unities. 32 If the old society is strong 
enough and plastic enough (a rare combination), it may go on 
itself, simply assuming new forms or allowing new varieties of 
life within its own limits; 33 but if its strength is of the rigid 
type, then its flowering time is also a beginning of decay, and 
the great individuals who spring from it can only perpetuate 
themselves in a new society. The men of the Periclean epoch 
were an end, the sound alas! alike with the unsound — even 
Plato formed no new society, though what he might have done, if 
circumstances had been more favorable in Sicily, "gives us to 
think." It was much so with men like Caesar and Cicero in 
Rome — though a few with more than ordinary proportions suc- 
ceeded them in the Empire. In fact, with developments like 
these in mind, Nietzsche is sometimes tempted to the melan- 
choly reflection that great individuals may be no advantage to 
a society, but rather a detriment — that its growth in power is 
best guaranteed by a preponderance of the average or lower 
type, they being the most fertile and having most of the elements 
of permanence in them. 34 He only resolves his difficulty by 

29 Mixed Opinions etc., §366; Joyful Science, §290; Beyond Good 
and Evil, § 260; Will to Power, § 704. 

30 Cf., as to the possible strictness of a sick man with himself, Dawn 
of Day, § 322. 

31 "Only to the ennobled man may freedom of spirit be given" {The 
Wanderer etc., § 350 ; cf . Zarathustra, I, viii ) . 

32 Will to Power, § 684; Werke, XIII, 114, § 227. 

33 Cf. the point of view of Human, etc., § 224. 

34 Will to Power, § 685. 



388 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

raising the question whether a permanent society is ipso facto 
a supreme good ; whether shorter life and decay, with a flower- 
ing time, are not preferable to however long life on a 
monotonous level. Is China, he asks [of course, as he knew it 
thirty or more years ago] , a desirable form of human existence 
upon the earth? We are perhaps here in presence of ultimate 
alternatives, i.e., have to choose between two ultimate social 
ideals. Along with the desire to eternalize a state, there is 
instinctively bred, he thinks, a fear of great individuals, and 
customs and institutions naturally arise which are unpropitious 
to them; hence the Chinese proverb, before quoted, "The great 
man is a public misfortune. ' ' K But for himself he does not 
hesitate : if the perpetuity of a state must be purchased at such 
a price, the game is not worth the candle — better that societies 
should come to an end than that the higher types should not 
appear. 36 And yet great men, though worth having at whatever 
cost on their own account, 37 are generally viewed by Nietzsche, 
as already stated, as the possible beginnings of new and greater 
societies. They are the variations on which the hope of the 
future hangs. If it is not merely man as we see him that we 
have in mind, but a higher type of man and the greatest possible 
variety of such types, then it is just to these individuals that 
we must give particular attention, encouraging them, giving 
them room, not measuring them by ordinary standards, and 
willing rather to be hurt by them than to prevent their arising, 
knowing that, whatever immediate harm they do, humanity's 
possibilities of further development are bound up with them. d 

IV 

The ruling tendency of our time is against Nietzsche. The 
highest thing now is to be a servant of the common life; the 
community is set above the individual — even the greatest. 6 This 
may be a wholesome reaction against the vulgar egoism of our 
wealth-seekers and political adventurers who want to make the 

36 WerJce, XII, 114, § 227; 119, § 232. 

86 Sometimes there are compensations of this character for political 
decline, a people in such circumstances getting again its mind, which had 
been practically lost in the struggles for power, and culture owing its best 
to the new situation (Human, etc., §465). 

37 Cf. Will to Power, § 996; Beyond Good and Evil, § 276. 



" PERSONS/' OR GREAT MEN 389 

rest of the community serve them — the ideal may be good for 
them, and for all of us so far as vulgar egoism lurks in us. But 
in any other sense, it rests to Nietzsche's mind on a deep mis- 
understanding. 38 The community, the mass or collectivity, is not 
really higher than the individual. It is higher than the ordi- 
nary individual, more important than the ordinary individual 
(with quantitative standards, many are more important than 
one) ; but the great individual is more important than it — for 
with him mankind attains a new level of being. The most human 
aim is not to provide for the comfort and happiness of the mass, 
but to raise the type — to welcome, then, exceptions to the 
average, to facilitate their existence instead of putting obstacles 
and mistrust in their way. For there is no other method of 
progress than the old one of variation and selection; only (and 
here Nietzsche departs from the Darwinian school) it is we 
who must do the selecting henceforth — giving to the rarer, finer, 
higher, stronger specimens the advantage, even taking them as 
leaders, instead of chilling and defeating them as alas ! we may, 
and often do (there is always, Nietzsche thinks, a half -conscious, 
underground conspiracy of the little against the great, of the 
average against the exception). 39 The proudest, most human 
act of the mass would be to array itself in loyalty to what is 
above it (mere mutual helping and safeguarding are not a 
peculiarly human thing — all animal societies in some measure 
practice it). Robert Browning's Paracelsus says, 

u Make no more giants, God, 
But elevate the race at once ! We ask 
To put forth just our strength, our human strength, 
All starting fairly, all equipped alike, 
Gifted alike, all eagle-eyed, true-hearted." 

But what a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous ! What a 
childlike view of the method of progress in the world, which is 
always by some starting better than others, by unlike gifts, by 
giants leading the way where smaller men dare not go, by slow, 
gradual, painful advance, instead of "at once" or by an Om- 
nipotent Hand. The hope of humanity, the reason for cherish- 
ing humanity, the ultimate raison d'etre for the great toiling 

88 Will to Power, § 766. 

89 Cf., as to the straits of the higher type, Will to Power, §§ 965, 987. 



390 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

mass of humanity, whose struggles and mutual helpfulness are 
surely not their own end, is, to those who think with Nietzsche, 
the emergence of the rarer, higher types preferred to — men 
who, relatively speaking, will be like Gods on the earth, and 
once more awaken a sentiment all unfamiliar to our democratic 
age — reverence. 

Nietzsche remarks that the philosopher, in the deeper sense 
of that word, has ever found himself, and has had to find him- 
self, in opposition to the day in which he lives — his enemy has 
been the ideal of that day ; and it is so now. Against the wild 
waters of selfishness that were pouring their tumultuous floods 
in the sixteenth century arose the ideal of a meek, renouncing, 
selfless humanity. In face of the degenerate aristocratic 
Athenian society of the fifth century B.C., and against the old 
high-sounding phrases to the use of which the nobility had for- 
feited their right by the kind of life they were leading, Socrates 
stood forth and practised his irony. And now when gregarious- 
ness is supreme, when " equality of rights " is preached and 
easily passes into equality of wrongs, now, when there is a gen- 
eral war against everything exceptional and privileged, a phi- 
losopher is needed with a new antithesis — one who will say 
that greatness consists in standing alone, in taking duties and 
responsibilities that cannot be common, in being greatly one's 
very particular and individual self. 40 



Let me now give Nietzsche's conception of great men a 
little more in detail. Though, as persons proper, they are not 
easily subsumable under a common type, certain very general 
common characteristics may be noted. 

First, they are great, not by carrying ordinary virtues to a 
high state of perfection ; their virtues are more or less different 
from the ordinary, for they are different men. To a certain 
extent they come under the same law with others ; but the char- 
acteristic thing about them is that they have a law of their 
own, one suitable to their peculiar being. Their virtues might 
not be virtues for the common man, and the virtues of the 
common man might conceivably be vices (weaknesses) in them. 
40 Beyond Good and Evil, § 212. 



" PERSONS/' OR GREAT MEN 391 

Their first duty is to respect themselves. 41 "Thou shalt become 
that which thou art" is what their conscience says to them. 42f 
They have a morality, but it is that paradoxical thing, an 
autonomous morality ("moral" and "autonomous" being ordi- 
narily opposites) ; they contradict the Hegelian command that 
no man shall have a private conscience. They do not accept 
duties from without; numbers, authority are nothing to them. 
Their duty is an "I will," the "I must" of overflowing creative 
strength. It is true that Zarathustra sickens at his "I will" 
from vulgar mouths — for the mass of men, obedience is safer, 
better than individual choice; but for great men, "I will" is 
the sign and seal of their superiority. They are accordingly 
careless of popular approval or sympathy, 43 g proud though not 
vain; they have a sense of singular duties and responsibilities, 
which they do not think of lowering by converting into duties 
and responsibilities for every man. 44 However dependent on 
others for success, their rise in the first place is due to their 
self-assertion 45 — they make their rights rather than receive 
them. They have an unalterable belief that to beings like them- 
selves others are naturally subject and may sacrifice — this 
without any feeling of harshness, force, or arbitrariness on 
their part, rather as something founded in the original law of 
things, as just. 46 

As is natural, men of this type have a taste for rare things 
such as ordinarily leave men cold — for art, for science, for high 
curiosity, for high virtue. While willing to sacrifice them- 
selves, if need be, this is not what characterizes them — a mad 
lover of pleasure does it also ; nor is following a passion — there 
are despicable passions ; nor is unselfishly doing for others — the 
consistency of a certain kind of selfishness may be greatest in 
the highest. What singles out the nobler type (perhaps without 
their being aware of the singularity) is their rare and singular 
measure of values, their ardor in spheres where others are indif- 

41 Will to Power, §§ 919, 873, 962. 

42 Joyful Science, § 270; cf. §§ 335, 336; also, Zarathustra, IV, i. 

43 Will to Poicer, § 962. 

44 Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 261, 272. 

45 Cf. Will to Power, § 885 (if the rise of great and rare natures had 
depended on the will of others, there would never have been a significant 
man) . 

48 Beyond Good and Evil, § 265. 



392 



NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 



ferent, their sacrifice on altars to Gods commonly unknown, 
their bravery with unconcern for honor, their self-sufficiency 
which flows over and imparts of its joy to men and things. 47 

It follows that they are more or less solitary. If the rest 
of us admire them, it is because they are different from us, not 
like us — we have the sort of joy in them that we have in nature. 48 
To a certain extent they wish to be by themselves — instincts of 
self -protection, of purity, tending that way. One accommodates 
oneself in the world, 49 — as Emerson puts it, "we descend to 
meet"; in solitude, the soul and mind are easier upright and 
true. Away from the market and glory happens all that is 
great ,- away from the market-place have ever dwelt the inventors 
of new values. 50 Nietzsche quotes a Hindu saying: "As Brahma 
one lives alone ; as a God in twos ; as a villager in threes ; where 
there are more, it is a noise and a tumult." 51 He speaks of 
the hundred deep solitudes one finds in a city like Venice — it 
was a part of the charm of that city for him, a "symbol for 
men of the future. ' ' 52 Solitude has practical limits, no doubt ; 
if it is too great, one does not perpetuate oneself — the social 
many, kindred to one another, perpetuate themselves best, and 
that is why, perhaps, commonness preponderates in the world. 53 
The great and singular hardly even make a class. They stand 
apart from one another, as well as from the crowd. They may 
mask themselves so well that, if they meet on the way, they 
scarcely know one another. They do not necessarily love one 
another, though they cannot fail in mutual respect. Nietzsche 
quotes a grim remark of Abbe Galiani, "Philosophers are 
not made for loving each other. Eagles do not fly in company. 
That has to be left to partridges and common birds. ... To 
soar aloft and have claws — that is the lot of great geniuses. ' ' M 
Nor is there anything undesirable in this hostility — in it all 
their strength comes out. 55 Tyranny is another matter. When 
"originality" wishes to tyrannize, it lays its hand, Nietzsche 
says, on its own life-principle 56 — and I imagine he would have 
said the same of a "person." Even when the great agree, they 



47 Joyful Science, § 55. 

48 Werke, XII, 125, § 244. 

49 Zarathustra, III, ix. 

60 Ibid., I, xiii. 

61 Werke, XIV, 252, §536. 



"Ibid., XI, 377, §574. 
"Ibid., XI, 238-9, §195. 
S4 Will to Power, § 989. 
i5 Werke, XI, 240, § 199. 
"Ibid., XI, 240, §199. 



" persons; 5 or great men 393 

do not follow one another — do not press to or long after one an- 
other. 57 Nietzsche at times carries the thought of independence 
so far that he departs from his usual conception of the great 
as the rulers of the rest of mankind, and compares them to 
Epicurean Gods who live apart from the world. 58 He really has 
a twofold classification of great men, the highest, rarest type 
simply giving direction to mankind, but not actually ruling it — 
ruling being a function of the others. 59 Aristotle said that one 
who was not a citizen was either low in the scale of humanity, 
or else a superhuman being, either a brute or a God ; 60 it is 
evident to which category Nietzsche 's supreme persons belong. 

I have already referred to the fear-inspiring (hose) aspect 
which great men may have. 61 Nietzsche warns against a too 
soft interpretation; there is a certain amount of the brute in 
them, even a nearness to crime. 62 They will be independent, 
even at the risk of subjecting others or sacrificing them — not 
because they are inhuman, but because independence may be 
impossible of attainment in any other way and they can 
transcend feelings of humanity on occasion, as Brutus tran- 
scended pity and friendship when for the res publico, he mur- 
dered Cagsar. 63 h 

They can, however, give to men as well as take from them, 
though doing so in their own way, serving " austerely. ' ' All 
but the very highest of them (who live apart) function in ways 
that are appreciable, are helpers of their kind as statesmen, 
commanders, leaders in difficult enterprises. They leave aims 
of personal security, comfort, and happiness to others. They 
can endure poverty and want, if need be — also sickness. They 
represent a new type of sainthood. 64 Their instinctive attitude 
to the weak is one of protection ; they come naturally to the 
defense of whatever is misused, misunderstood, or calumniated 
(whether God or Devil). They have their own kind of goodness 

67 llid., XIV, 418, §300. 

88 Ibid., XIV, 262, § 4. 

09 See The Antichristian, §57; Will to Power, §§998-9, and later in 
this volume, pp. 449-51. In Human, etc., § 521, greatness is treated as 
equivalent to giving direction. 

80 Politics, I, ii. 

81 Pp. 234-5. 

62 Will to Power, § 951 ; cf. Ecce Homo, IV, § 5. 

83 Werke, XI, 239, § 196; Joyful Science, § 98; cf. § 382. 

"Will to Power, §§943-4; Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 486, §36. 



394, NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

and kindness; they take pleasure in the larger justice and in 
the practice of it. 65 They are counselors for troubled minds 
and consciences. 66 They rise to higher air, not occasionally but 
they live there; not so much strength as permanence of high 
sentiment marks them. 67 

In general a high self-control characterizes these men. They 
are many-sided, perhaps have the most varied powers, but these 
are harnessed together to an end. They are not impulsive 
beings, but collected, cool, reasonable; they do even heroic acts 
in this spirit, not blindly following feeling. 68 They like naivete 
and naive people, but as onlookers and higher beings : they find 
Faust as naive as Gretchen. 69 Even giving one's life for some- 
thing is not necessarily a mark of superiority — it may be from 
pity or from anger or from revenge ; how many have sacrificed 
their life for pretty women — and even, what is worse, their 
health! 701 For in Nietzsche's eyes, greatness of soul is not to 
be separated from intellectual greatness. The really great look 
on "heroes, martyrs, geniuses, the inspired" as not "quiet, 
patient, fine, cold, slow, enough' ' for them. 715 Philosophers are 
the greatest men. They are ever against mere impulse, and 
first and surface views — the natural antagonists of sensualism, 
whether in practice or as a theory. 72 Indeed, Nietzsche thinks 
that individuals generally are less likely to lose their balance 
and be insane than groups, parties, peoples, periods. 73 

Moreover, the great are happy in their lot, thankful for 
existence. 74 Though they may suffer — and capacity for suffer- 
ing is a mark of greatness — they can also play and laugh, laugh 
at themselves and their failures, make jests of pathetic situations 
in which they find themselves. Indeed, it was man, the most 

85 Beyond Good and Evil, § 213. 
88 Werke, XIV, 414, § 298. 

87 Mixed Opinions etc., § 397; Beyond Good and Evil, § 72. 

88 Will to Power, §§883, 928; cf. Werke, XIII, 144, §335; Dawn of 
Day, § 215. 

89 Will to Power, § 943; cf. the references to Faust, Werke, XIII, 335, 
§830. 

70 Ibid., § 929. 

71 Will to Power, §§ 984, 993; cf. Werke, XI, 379-89, § 579. 

72 Beyond Good and Evil, § 14. Cf. two striking pictures of the phi- 
losopher, his experiences and manner of life, ibid., §§213, 292. 

73 Ibid., § 156. 

74 A man of genius is unendurable, unless he has two things besides: 
thankfulness and purity (ibid., §74). 



"PERSONS/' OR GREAT MEN 395 

suffering animal, who invented laughter. 75 Philosophers may 
be graded according for their capacity for it — the greatest being 
those capable of golden laughter; Gods themselves laugh in 
some superhuman way. 76 The greatest sin on earth was the 
word of him who said, "Woe unto you that laugh now!" 77 
Zarathustra knows rather how to sanctify laughter; he puts it 
as a crown upon his head. 78 For the secret of laughter is 
strength, abounding vitality. From this source, too, flow beauty 
and grace. "The great will not condescend to take anything 
seriously," said Emerson; and above the hero with his violent 
struggles and solemn ways, Nietzsche puts the super-hero, who 
stands with relaxed muscles and unharnessed will, dowered with 
beauty and grace — above the straining neck of the ox is the 
"angel's eye." 79 

In their very manners the great betray themselves, as a 
Greek Goddess did in her walk. The labor that stoops and de- 
forms, affecting even the gait, is foreign to them. They are 
capable of leisure also, this being understood in a nobler sense 
than that of mere rest from toil. They may even have an air 
of frivolity on occasion — in word, dress, bearing. They have a 
pleasure in forms, are convinced that politeness is one of the 
great virtues, mistrust all letting oneself go, rank "good 
nature" low, are disgusted with vulgar familiarity. 80 In short 
they are gentlemen, but in an intellectual and spiritual sense. 
Nietzsche ventures to call his Beyond Good and Evil a school 
for the gentleman, the conception being taken "more spiritually 
and radically than ever before. " k He defines it as one of the 
marks of the gentleman that he has the sentiment of distance,, 
knows how to distinguish and recognize rank, gradation between 
man and man everywhere ; otherwise one comes hopelessly under 
the category of the canaille. The Germans, he says in a bitter 

75 Ibid., § 270; Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 15; Dawn of Day, §386; Will 
to Power, § 990. 

76 Beyond Good and Evil, § 294. 

77 Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 16. Nietzsche is hardly happy in this illus- 
tration; Jesus has nothing against laughter — he had said just before, 
"Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh" (Luke vi, 21). 
It should be said for Nietzsche, however, that he reads " here " for " now," 
and regards Jesus as pronouncing woe on the joys of earth in general. 

78 Ibid., IV, xiii, § 18. 

79 Ibid., II, xiii. 

80 Will to Power, § 493; cf. Human, etc., § 479. 



'396 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

moment, are, with a few exceptions, canaille; they are so com- 
placent (gutmilthig) , that if the most profound spirit of all the 
ages should appear among them, some savior of the Capitol 
would imagine that he was to be equally taken into account. 81 
The modern industrial situation has its troublous, threatening 
side in his eyes, partly because our new magnates are not gen- 
tlemen, but show by their vulgar ways, their cunning and un- 
scrupulousness, their "red, fat hands " that they are an upstart 
class. 821 As a rule, the gentleman is born and bred, the result 
indeed of generations of training: it is an ideal intimately con- 
nected with an aristocracy, 83 and manners tend to deteriorate 
in general, when the influence of an aristocracy declines. 84 

Such is an incomplete portraiture of great men or " per- 
sons/ ' as Nietzsche conceives them. I may add an interesting 
observation which he makes upon polytheism. This ancient 
belief rendered, he thinks, a great service in idealizing different 
types of individuals, and allowing them their rights against one 
another. While it was counted an aberration for a human being 
to assert a particular idea of his own and derive from it his 
law, his joy, and his right, those doing so excusing themselves 
and saying, ' ' Not I ! not I ! but a God through me, ' ' in the world 
of higher beings it was admitted to be different. There a number 
of norms of conduct might exist; one God was not the denial 
or abuse of another; there for the first time individuals were 
freely allowed, individual rights revered. The invention of 
Gods, heroes, and supermen of all kinds, as of dwarfs, fairies, 
centaurs, satyrs, demons, and devils, he regards as an inestima- 
ble preparation for the justification of the human individual in 
asserting his rights; the freedom given to one God against 
others became at last the individual's freedom against statutes, 
customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, on the other hand — really 
a consequence of the doctrine of a single normal type of man, 
an assertion of a normal God, beside whom are only false Gods — 
may be viewed as so far a danger to humanity; it involves a 

81 Ecce Homo, III, x, §4. 

82 Joyful Science, § 40. 

83 Werke, XI, 367, §554; cf. the fine detailed picture, Dawn of Day, 
§ 201. A true aristocracy is not, however, a closed caste, but takes new 
elements into itself continuously ( Werke, XIV, 226, § 457) . 

"Human, etc., § 250. 



" PERSONS/' OR GREAT MEN 397 

revival of, or rather reversion to, the intellectual atmosphere 
that existed before the age of varying individuals; it flattens, 
levels men — tends to give them but one set of eyes, while the 
glory and privilege of man among the animals has been that 
there are no eternal, i.e., unchanging, horizons and perspectives 
for him. 85 In accordance with this strong feeling Nietzsche 
expresses the hope that joy in foreign originality, without desire 
to ape it, will some day be the mark of a new culture. 86 As for 
himself, he wants to help all who seek an ideal pattern for their 
lives simply by showing how to do it; and his greatest joy is in 
encountering individual patterns that are not like his own. 
"The Devil take all imitators and followers and eulogists and 
wonderers and self -surrenderers V s1 

85 Joyful Science, § 143; cf. Zarathustra, III, viii, § 2. 
89 Werke, XI, 240, § 199. 
"Ibid., XI, 242, §202. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

MORAL CONSTRUCTION (Concluded). THE SUPERMAN 1 

" Superman" is a strong, picturesque expression such as 
Nietzsche delighted on occasion to use. It occurs chiefly in 
the prose-poem, Thus spake Zarathustra (1883). It does not 
appear in Beyond Good and Evil, which soon followed and is 
a more matter-of-fact statement of essentially the same thoughts 
as those contained in the earlier work, and only once in The 
Genealogy of Morals, which succeeded Beyond Good and Evil 
and is a somewhat connected treatment of certain controverted 
special points in that book. 



Yet, like all Nietzsche's extreme phrases, it covers a sub- 
stantial thought. The word, oddly as it sounds (I think it was 
Mr. Bernard Shaw who first popularized it among us), is 
formed most naturally. We often speak of "superhuman" 
excellencies and qualities, though usually having in mind some- 
thing bordering on the Divine ; and any one having these superi- 
orities is, of course, literally speaking, a "superman" — the only 
novelty in Nietzsche's view being that the superhuman traits 
are regarded as attainable by man. The substantive itself is 
not absolutely new. Mommsen spoke of the iEschylean heroes 
as "supermen." Homberger (1882) called Bismarck a "super- 
man." Goethe used the word a couple of times: 2 Herder did 
once in an unfavorable, Jean Paul in a favorable, sense. 3 The 
first use of it by Nietzsche (so far as I remember) is in Joyful 
Science (1882), where "TJoermenschen" are spoken of along 

1 This chapter appeared in substance in The Journal of Philosophy, 
Psychology, and Scientific Methods, August 5, 1915 (Vol. XII, No. 16). 

2 In the " Zueignung " of 1784 and the " Urfaust," 1775. 

8 For a full account of the history of the term, see R. M. Meyer's 
article, " Der TJbermensch. Eine vorgeschichtliche Skizze," Zeitschrift fiir 
deutsche Wortforschung, May, 1900. 

398 



THE SUPERMAN 399 

with Gods and heroes, and by way of contrast to "Neben- 
menschen" and "Untermenschen" (such as dwarfs, fairies, 
satyrs). 4 Before this, he had made use of the adjective as we 
all do, speaking, for instance, of "superhuman goodness and 
justice" — and, indeed, "super" in general (or its equivalent) 
appears rather often, as in "super-German" (of Wagner's 
thoughts), "super-national" (of universal aims), "super- 
hellenic, " "super-historical"; he spoke of man as the "super- 
animal" and of a "distant super-world." 

During the period of reaction against his early idealization 
of Wagner, Nietzsche made adverse reflections on the elevation 
of individuals into superhuman beings. The cultus of genius 
seemed to him a continuation of the old worship of Gods and 
princes; when one raises certain men to a superhuman level, 
one is apt to look on whole classes as lower than they really 
are. He felt that there is a danger for genius itself when it 
begins to fancy itself superhuman. 5 It is curious that Nietzsche 
always had a more or less pronounced aversion to Carlyle's 
hero-worship. 6 Even as late as Thus spake Zarathustra there 
is a slighting reference to Gods and supermen (taken as people 
up in the clouds) ; Zarathustra is tired of them 7 — as of the 
poets who invent them. And yet, despite such chaffing, Nietz- 
sche's early instinct for what is superior and great is by the 
time of Thus spake Zarathustra in full sway again, and this 
book itself is a product of it. He had said almost at the outset 
of his career (I have quoted the words before, but they will 
bear repeating) : "I see something higher and more human 
above me than I myself am; help me all to attain it, as I will 
help every one who feels and suffers as I do — in order that at 
last the man may arise who is full and measureless in knowl- 
edge and love and vision and power, and with his whole being 
cleaves to nature and takes his place in it as judge and valuer 
of things." 8 And now, after years of self-criticism in which 
everything in his early beliefs that could be shaken was shaken, 

* Joyful Science, § 143. Cf. the description of the way in which he 
" picked up " the word, in Zarathustra, III, xii, § 3. 

B Human, etc., §§461, 164; cf. Dawn of Day, § 298. 

The references to Carlyle are in Dawn of Day, § 298 ; Joyful Science, 
§ 97; Will to Power, § 27; Ecce Homo, III, § 1. 

7 Zarathustra, II, xvii. 

8 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 6. 



400 



NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 



the old attitude recurs — and stands out clearer, and more as- 
sured than ever. 

u When half -gods go, 
The gods arrive." 

Wagner had gone, the early illusions about him had vanished; 
but the transcendent vision of superhuman excellence which 
Nietzsche had momentarily identified with that great figure 
survived. 



ii 

' ' Superman' ' is a poetic designation for great individuals 
carried to their utmost human limit, for " persons'' in the full 
sense of that term. a Superman is man as he might be — not 
another species, but our very human flesh and blood trans- 
figured. As Professor Simmel, one of the critical writers on 
Nietzsche who has penetrated most deeply into his thought, puts 
it, ''The superman is nothing but the crystallization of the 
thought that man can develop beyond the present stage of his 
existence — and hence should." 9 Zarathustra has scanned the 
great men of history, and the greatest of them are, like the 
smallest men, "all-too-human"; "there has never yet been a 
superman. ' ' 10 Individuals like Alcibiades, Caesar, Frederick 
II, Leonardo da Vinci, Caesar Borgia, Napoleon, Goethe, Bis- 
marck are approximations to the type, but all come short 
somewhere — they were men of power, took great and fearful 
responsibilities, but were spoiled by some defect. 11 Zarathustra 
is spoken of by Nietzsche as an incorporation of the ideal, 12 but 
Zarathustra is an imaginary figure — and, as portrayed, he him- 
self looked beyond. 

Nietzsche once puts his problem, and incidentally reveals 
his understanding of the new phrase, thus: Dismissing the 
current individualistic morality along with the collectivistic, 
since the former, like the latter, fails to recognize an order of 

9 Op. tit., p. 235 ; cf . pp. 5, 6. 

10 Zarathustra, II, iv. 

1 x Napoleon, Goethe, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Balzac 
are once spoken of as " good Europeans " ( i.e., super-national ) and a kind 
of " higher men," but not deep and original enough for a philosophy such 
as Nietzsche craves (Beyond Good and Evil, § 256). 

12 Ecce Homo, III, vi, § 6. 



THE SUPERMAN 401 

rank among men and wants to give equal freedom to all, he 
says that his thoughts turn rather on the degree of power that 
one or another person may exercise over others or over all, 
i.e., on how far a sacrifice of freedom and virtual enslavement 
may be the basis for the bringing forth of a higher type. Put 
in the crudest way, to what extent could we sacrifice the de- 
velopment of humanity to the end of bringing a higher type 
than man into existence? His concept, or rather image 
(Gleichniss) , for such a type is "superman." 13 Another state- 
ment of the problem, put in the form of a demand, is: "To 
bring forth beings who stand elevated above the whole race 
of man, and to sacrifice one 's self and one 's kind to this end. ' ' 14 
Taking this literally, a new species is suggested, and counte- 
nance is lent to the view that Nietzsche conceived of an evolu- 
tion in the future like that which Darwin is supposed to have 
proved in the past, namely, of a new biological type. But there 
is reason to doubt whether Nietzsche had anything so definite 
as this in mind. The whole question as to his relation to Dar- 
winism is a mooted point. He may himself have had different 
attitudes at different times — that of criticism becomes marked 
toward the end of his life. The view that seems to me most 
reasonable is that he finally settled down to thinking of super- 
men simply as extraordinary specimens of men, who, however, 
if favored, instead of being fought as they commonly are, might 
lead to a considerable modification of the human type — one so 
great that, speaking in literary and fluid rather than scientific 
fashion, the result might be called a new species. He expressly 
says in one of his later books, "Not what shall take the place 
of humanity in the successive order of beings is the problem 
I propose — man is an end; but what type of man we shall 
train, shall wish for as one of higher value, worthier of life, 
surer of the future. The more valuable type has often enough 
existed, but as a happy chance, an exception, never as some- 
thing willed. Instead of this it has been something feared, 
almost the fearful thing — and from motives of fear the con- 
trasted type has been willed, trained, attained: man the do- 
mestic animal, the social animal, the sick animal — the Chris- 
tian." In the following paragraph, he speaks of the higher 
13 Will to Power, §§ 859, 866. 14 Werke, XIV, 261, § 4. 



402 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

type as " relatively' ' a "sort of superman." 15 Once he makes 
a derisive reference to "learned cattle who had suspected him 
of Darwinism." 16 If Nietzsche finally held to Darwinism at 
all — and it is not certain that he did 17 — it was only in the sense 
of a development-theory in general, much as Emerson spoke 
of the worm mounting "through all the spires of form" to 
man. For not evolution, not even selection, is a distinctive 
Darwinian idea, but only natural selection, along with the theory 
of surplus numbers and the consequent struggle for existence — 
and Nietzsche distrusted these premises of Darwin's view, and 
wanted not so much natural selection (which he thought often 
favored the weak) as conscious, human selection in the direc- 
tion of individuals of maximum power. 

in 

But when we ask how the superman is to be got, we are left 
more or less in the vague. Nietzsche thinks that we have not 
sufficient data for a judgment as yet. Physiology, medicine, 
psychology, sociology — sciences that must give us the data — are 
not developed enough. Those who imagine that Nietzsche has 
any short cut to Utopia have little idea of the manner of man 
he was. Brandes called his view "aristocratic radicalism" (in 
distinction from radicalism of the democratic or socialistic 
type) ; but he is radical in thought, not in proposing a pro- 
gram. He has a profound sense of the slowness of all real social 
changes. He contrasts the French Revolution with what it 
mighi have been, had steadier heads kept in control. 18 Chronic 
ailings (such as lung troubles) develop from slight causes re- 
peated constantly, he observes, and cures, if possible, come in 
much the same way (in this case by repeated deep breathing) ; 
and the truth holds equally of spiritual ills. 19 So "no impa- 
tience" now! "The superman is our next stage" — but "mod- 
eration" along with courage is needed in aiming thitherward. 

15 The Antichristian, §§3, 4. Cf. the language, "a relatively super- 
human type," in Ecce Homo, IV, § 5. 

16 Ecce Homo, III, § 1. 

17 1 have already alluded to Richter's excellent discussion of the whole 
subject, Richter, op. cit., pp. 219-38. 

18 Dawn of Day, § 534. 

19 Ibid., §462. 



THE SUPERMAN 403 

Zarathustra, the prophet of the coming order, has repose, can 
wait. Life and action having got a purpose and meaning, there 
is no need of leaping, and each step onward may be perfect 
and give happy feeling. All violent longing is to be overcome — 
the calm of the great stream is to come in its place. 20 Speaking 
more prosaically, we are to guard against exchanging the cus- 
tomary morality for a new valuation suddenly and violently — 
we must continue to live in the old for a long time and take 
the new in small doses repeatedly, till we find, very late, 
probably, that the new valuation has got predominant force 
and that the little doses have made a new nature in us. 21 In- 
deed, in order to be taught, the new morality must introduce 
itself in connection with the existing moral law and under its 
names and guises — that is, it must be more or less opportunist 
and compromising. 22 Nietzsche does not think much of "agi- 
tators," all too apt to be empty heads, who flatten and inflate 
any good idea they get hold of and give it out with a hollow 
sound. 23 It is a change in the depths of thought that is needed, 
not a noisy enthusiasm. And this is why he might have had 
reserves as to some who call themselves Nietzscheans today — 
for, he observes, with a touch of humor, the first disciples of 
a doctrine prove nothing against it ! b 

I have said that his thought as to how to reach the superman 
is vague. It may be something, however, to turn the mind in 
this direction, and to have a clear conviction that the result is 
more or less in our hands. If mankind were really persuaded 
that its chief function is not to make itself happy and secure 
on the earth, but to produce godlike individuals, it would surely 
make a difference. At present, the old Christian thought of 
heaven and hell being no longer regnant, there is, Nietzsche 
thinks, no common aim, and things are going by luck, hit or 
miss. If there is any faith, it is a vague and more or less lazy 
confidence that things will come out right anyway, "Providence" 
or "evolution" or "progress" or "the course of things" being 
the determining matter — as if, says Nietzsche, it did not depend 
on us how things come out, as if we could let them go their 

20 Werke, XIV, 263, § 10; 265, § 21; 286, § 99. 

21 Dawn of Day, § 534. 

22 Will to Power, § 957. 

23 Genealogy of Morals, III, § 8. 



404 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

way. 24 Indeed, what does " coming out right " mean, save as 
we have some notion of what is right? Nietzsche is opposed to 
leaving things to chance — and it may be counted one of his dis- 
tinctions in the future that he restored rationality (in the large 
sense) to its proper place as the ruler of the world — something 
to be quite distinguished from the faith that rationality, with 
a big R, does rule the world — and that he helped to make man 
the sovereign creator of his own destiny. 

A word which Nietzsche often uses is "Ziichtung"; its mean- 
ing is training or breeding, a practical equivalent being pur- 
posive selection. It is something that Burbank is doing in Cali- 
fornia in the realm of plant life. Nietzsche, however, uses the 
term in a large sense and comprehends under it all the means, 
physical, social, spiritual, that may be used for producing the 
great result at which he aims. 25 Sometimes he uses "Erziehung," 
meaning education, not in our conventional, but in the broadest 
sense. " Ziichtung," however, brings out more clearly the neces- 
sary factor of selection. 26 Let us observe, he urges, nature and 
history and see in what way notable results have been reached 
unconsciously and perhaps clumsily and by very slow methods 
in the past; then, taking things into our own hands, let us 
see if the results we aim at cannot be reached in a similar way, 
but more surely and with less waste of time and force. Let an 
organized mankind test Darwin's assertions by experiment — 
even if the experimentation covers centuries and millenniums 
and we have to turn the whole earth into experiment stations. 
Let it be proved whether apes can be developed into men, and 
lower races into higher races, and whether from the best man- 
kind has at present to show, something still higher can be 
reared. 27 The Chinese have made trees that bear roses on one 
side and pears on the other — and where are the limits to be set 
to the possibilities of selective human breeding? Historical 
processes may be improved upon : granting that races and racial 

24 Will to Power, § 243. 

25 Cf. the excellent remarks of Nietzsche's sister, Werke (pocket ed. ), 
VII, p. xi. 

28 " Ziichtung " is contradistinguished from " Erziehung " by F. Rit- 
telmeyer, one of the most discriminating German writers on Nietzsche 
{Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 59). 

27 Werke, XII, 191, §§408-9; cf. Dawn of Day, §551; Werke (pocket 
ed.), V, 396, § 13. 



THE SUPERMAN 405 

struggles, national fevers and personal rivalries, have done their 
part, why could not the long-drawn-out and painful tale be 
crowded into brief space and the net results be got without the 
fearful waste ! 28 It is evident that Nietzsche has in mind a 
control of humanity such as has not been heard or perhaps 
thought of before. He speaks repeatedly of a world-economy, 
a rule of the earth — and it might be said in reply that there 
would be need of a God to administer it. A sort of contra- 
diction might be charged up to him in that the superman who 
is to be reached as the outcome of a process of evolution would 
be required to start and guide the process — we should have to 
be Gods to know how to create them ! And Nietzsche could only 
answer that, as individuals learn by doing and have to venture 
even if they make mistakes, so with mankind — that the only 
practical thing in the present case is to start with as strong, 
masterful intelligence as we can get, aiming at world-control, 
and hope to win sooner or later a world-result. 

IV 

The initiative in such an enterprise can evidently only be 
taken by those who have the thought that inspires it — naturally 
they will be few. They must be thinkers, and men of action 
at the same time. 29 They will choose themselves, and, so to 
speak, put the crown on their own heads. Evidently physical 
force is not sufficient to constitute them — force of this kind can 
do little in a connection like this. Neither is it a question of 
wealth — our rich men are the poorest, says Nietzsche, the aim 
of all wealth being forgotten. 30 Nor is it any longer a question 
of race, though a superior race, the "blond [Aryan] beast," 
did once lift Europe to a higher level — there are no pure 
races in Europe now. 31 Nor is it a question of aristocratic 
descent — where in Germany will you find, Nietzsche asks, a 
great family in whose blood there is not venereal infection and 
corruption? Peasant blood, he thinks, is still the best. c Not 

28 Werke, XII, 190, § 408. 

29 Cf. Shaw's description of the superman as some kind of "phi- 
losopher-athlete" (Man and Superman, p. 182), and Montaigne's remark, 
" The true philosophers, if they were great in science, were yet much 
greater in action " ( Essays, I, xxiv ) . 

30 Will to Power, § 61. 

81 Werke, XIII, 356, §§ 877-9. 



406 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

whence you come, but whither you go, is the critical question 
for the nobility to be. 32 The challenge is, How strong are you, 
how near completeness in body, mind, and soul, how far can 
you stand alone, assume responsibility, be your own master, and 
thereby be fit to master others. 33 In other words, it is a question 
of character (in the great sense). 34 The men to take the lead 
in redeeming the world from folly and chance, and in organ- 
izing collective experiments and hazardous enterprises to that 
end, will be "philosophers" of this type. Every sound quality 
that belongs to the ascending line of life will be theirs. So- 
called "aristocrats of intellect" are not enough; 35 there must be 
blood and sound physical organization; they must be capable 
of projecting a new physiological line — all aristocracies start 
from superior whole men. d Nor will they despise the economic 
basis of life. Though wealth will be nowise a distinctive mark 
of them (others will have more than they) they will have wealth 
— enough to make them independent and able to do what they 
like, instead of what other people like, enough to lift them 
above pitiful economies, enough to marry well on and pay for 
the best instruction to their children. Nietzsche's ideas will 
hardly be thought extravagant in this connection. He says 
that 300 Thaler a year may have almost the same effect as 
30,000 ; 36 and, in commenting on the Greek aristocracies with 
their hereditary property and saying that they "lived better" 
than we, he significantly adds that he means "better in every 
sense, above all much more simply in food and drink. " 37 At the 
sanie time the aristocracy to be will control wealth, even if not 
possessing it in any high degree — they will see that it does not 
hinder, but rather serves the great public ends they have at 
heart. Nietzsche even throws out what may seem a wild sug- 
gestion, namely, that the wise must secure the monopoly of the 
money-market : however elevated they may be above the wealthy 

32 Zarathustra, III, xii, § 12. 

38 Werke, XII, 363-4, §§ 397, 399. 

34 Beyond Good and Evil, § 203. 

35 Will to Power, § 942. 
86 Human, etc., § 479. 

37 The Wanderer etc., §184; cf. Werke, X, 388, §209. As to the 
danger of wealth, and of possessions possessing us, see Mixed Opinions 
etc., §§ 310, 317. Burckhardt remarks that social rank was not deter- 
mined by wealth among the Greeks of the 5th century B. c. (Oriechische 
Kulturgeschichte, Vol. IV., pp. 208-10). 



THE SUPERMAN 407 

class by their aims and manner of life, they must give direction 
to wealth — it is absolutely necessary, he declares, that the 
highest intelligence give direction to it. Money will be safest 
under their control — otherwise it will be liable to go (as so 
often happens now) for extreme one-sided tendencies. 38 

These men, too, will know, as real aristocracies always know, 
the significance of marriage. 39 Love will be looked at from a 
new angle (new, that is, to the modern world) — it will be con- 
trolled by ideal considerations. 40 Marriage will not be from 
passion or emotion simply. Nor will mere considerations of 
mutual fitness and compatibility be the controlling thing. The 
main aim of marriage for men like these will be the continuation 
of their type, and propagation will be a matter of the utmost 
sacredness. 41 Zarathustra speaks in this spirit in a passage 
already summarized. 426 He speaks also of the helpful 
influence which physicians may exert. 43 Women may help 
directly — the deepest instincts of motherhood may be brought 
into line with the aim of producing a higher race. 44 
It is, of course, a different aim from the ordinary one of 
"founding a family' ' which vulgar and self -centered people 
may wish to do — the aristocracy to be will exist for universal 
ends, and, instead of being a closed line or set of lines, it will 
take to itself new elements of promise wherever they appear, 
and will draw on all the varied talents that are needed for 
the administration of the earth. 45 As little is it a national 
aristocracy which Nietzsche has in mind. His thought is Euro- 
pean 46 (or wider) and the aristocracy will be international — 
the principle of the possibility of a United Europe; he speaks 
of possible "international marital unions" as fortresses under 
whose protection the training of a race of future lords of the 

38 WerJce, XII, 204, §§ 434-5. 

39 Cf. Ibid., XI, 350, § 505. 

i0 Ibid., XIV, 261, §3. Cf. XII, 196, §418 (reflections on conditions 
that were favorable to the many free individuals among the Greeks, among 
them, " marriage not on account of erotic passion " ) . 

41 Ibid., XIV, 261, § 3; cf. Will to Power, §§ 732, 804. 

42 Zarathustra, I, xx; see p. 311 of this volume. 

43 Human, etc., §243; cf. Werke, XI, 145, §453. 

44 Zarathustra, I, xviii ("Let the beam of a star shine in your love! 
Let your hope say ' May I bear the superman ! '" ) . 

45 Werke, XIV, 226-7, §§ 457, 459. 

46 Ibid., XIII, 358, § 881; cf. XIV, 226, § 456. 



408 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

earth may go on. 47 He is aware that accident more or less rules 
in the world, and perhaps always will — he is aware that genius 
itself is often a happy accident. 48 Indeed, some of his inter- 
preters cannot clearly make out whether the superman is to be 
trained and educated or is to come like a piece of fate. 49 Nietz- 
sche, however, really combines both views, saying that we may 
look to heredity, happy marriages, and to happy accidents to 
give us great men 50 — he is really a more balanced thinker than 
many imagine. 

With this training of an aristocracy is also to go every 
possible measure for preventing degeneration among the mass 
of men. Races that cannot be utilized in some way may be 
allowed to die out. Sickly people and criminals may be kept 
from propagating themselves. 51 Nietzsche does not think much 
of those who talk of man's rights in marriage; it is better to 
speak of the right to marry, and he thinks it a rare right. Per- 
mission to produce children should be granted as a distinction — 
physicians' certificates being in order. 52 Women have obvious 
power here, and with power Nietzsche suggests responsibility. 
Remarking that the earth might be turned into a garden of 
happiness, if the dissatisfied, melancholy, grumbling could be 
prevented from perpetuating themselves, he intimates here "a 
practical philosophy for the female sex." It would also be 
better if men of high intellect, but with weakly nervous char- 
acter, could not be perpetuated in kind. Society may hold in 
readiness the severest measures of restriction to this end, on 
occasion even castration. "The Bible commandment 'thou shalt 
not kill' is a naivete compared with the commandment of life 
to decadents, 'thou shalt not beget.' " 53 

47 Will to Power, § 960; cf. Werke, XII, 368, § 718. 

48 Cf. Werke, XI, 273, § 289; Will to Power, § 907. 

49 E.g., Dorner, op. cit., pp. 194-5. 

50 Will to Power, §§ 995-6. 

51 Werke, XI, 139, §441 (cf. J. A. Thomson, "We do not want to 
eliminate bad stock by watering it with good, but by placing it under 
conditions where it is relatively or absolutely infertile," Heredity, p. 
331); Werke, XII, 188, §404. 

52 Ibid., XIV, 249, §522; XII, 188, §403; XIV, 248, §518. 

6 * Mixed Opinions etc., §278; Werke, XIV, 263, § 10; Will to Power, 
§ 734 (cf. XII, 196, § 418, as to what the Greeks allowed). 



THE SUPERMAN 409 



Under what general social conditions would the higher 
species (or the incipient approaches thereto) best arise? Nietz- 
sche 's view is almost paradoxical. Not favorable, but unfavora- 
ble conditions are best for them. With all said and done as to 
aiming at them and facilitating them, circumstances must not 
be too easy, conditions too soft, for them. He generally gives 
us the extremes of his thought (of course, at different times or 
in different connections), leaving us to reconcile them — and I 
am not sure that I can quite reconcile them in this case. The 
underlying idea is that the men of the future will be men of 
power and can only be proved by opposition. He early saw 
the place of insecurity, peril, and danger in educating the race 
and bringing out its higher qualities, and he applies the view 
in the present connection. He had made a special study of 
Greek life, and of the marked individuals who appeared in such 
numbers in the Greek city-states he observes, "It was necessary 
to be strong: danger was near — it lurked everywhere." Men 
became great not so much from the good intentions of the 
people, as because danger challenged them and they asserted 
themselves even to the point of seeming hose to the people. 54 
So with the Komans — they were the outcome of a long-continued 
struggle for power: it was in this way that they reached their 
giant stature, like that of a primeval forest. 55 Let one go 
through history, says Nietzsche: the times when the individual 
becomes ripe for his perfection, i.e., free, when the classic type 
of the sovereign man is reached — "oh, no, they were never 
humane times!" There must be no choice, either above or 
below trodden under foot. It is no small advantage to have a 
hundred Damocles-swords over one — thereby one learns to 
dance, comes to "fredom of motion." 56 The view seems ex- 

64 Twilight etc., x, § 3; WerJce, X, 384-5, § 199. 

65 Will to Power, § 959. 

5 e Ibid., §770; cf. Twilight etc., ix, §38, and what Stendhal says of 
the condottieri and small princes of Italy in 1400 (Vie de Napoleon, pp. 
17-8) ; also what Nietzsche quotes, in explanation of the success of 
Mohammed in the space of thirteen years, from Napoleon, " perhaps there 
had been long civil wars, under the influence of which great characters, 
great talents, irresistible impulses, etc., were formed" (Werke, XIII, 
330, §814). 



410 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

treme, and yet the very fundamental idea of Nietzsche, that 
of an order of rank (Rangordnung) , presupposes differences of 
power, differences usually determined by opposition and con- 
flict — man in his struggle with nature being the grandiose pro- 
totype. Even under conditions of civilization one must guard 
against too much intercourse with the good-natured — for it 
relaxes: all intercourse is good in which one is armed (not neces- 
sarily with a pistol — need I add for the benefit of the simple?). 57 
Perhaps in no way does Nietzsche go so contrary to current 
ways of thinking; and he is well aware of it. Modern life, he 
remarks, wants at all points to be protected — yet when danger 
goes, vigilance goes, too, and stimulus and exuberance of spirit, 
" coarse remedies" being revolutions and wars. It may even 
be that with the general increase of security, fineness of mind 
will no longer be needed — and will decrease as in China; 
struggle against Christianity, the anarchy of opinion, competi- 
tion among princes, peoples, and business men, having thus far 
hindered the complete result. 58 To this extent Nietzsche looks 
at the whole modern situation from an unusual standpoint. 
With his main thought on the development of a new and higher 
class of men, he exclaims, "If things grow more insecure about 
us, so much the better! I wish that we live somewhat circum- 
spectly and martially/' 59 Wars are for the time-being the 
greatest stimulants of the imagination, now that Christian 
transports and terrors have become feeble. The social revolu- 
tion which he thinks is coming will, perhaps, be something still 
greater. He accordingly faces eventualities of this sort undis- 
turbed. The French Revolution, he observes, made Napoleon 
and Beethoven possible; and for a parallel recompense one 
would be obliged to welcome an anarchistic downfall of our 
whole civilization. 60 It is under conditions of peril that personal 
manly virtue gets value, and a stronger type, physically and in 
every way, is trained; beauty (schone Manner) again becomes 
possible, and it really also goes better with the philosophers. 61 
And yet Nietzsche had not had his Christian education for 

e7 Will to Power, §§ 856, 918. 

68 Werhe, XI, 369, §558; XII, 191, §410. 

*»IMd., XI, 368, §557; cf. 142, §451. 

60 Ibid., XI, 369, § 559; Will to Power, §§ 868, 127, 877. 

81 Will to Power, §127; cf. §729; also Werke, XIII, 358, §882. 



THE SUPERMAN 411 

nothing; and it is the necessities of the situation, the logic of 
the production of great men, that lead him to say what he does. 
" Persons " do not come easily in this world. Good intentions 
alone are not sufficient — the force of circumstances is generally 
a co-operating cause. Moreover, rude situations may be neces- 
sary, where finer ones cannot be appreciated. Speaking of 
physical wars and revolutions, he calls them ' ' coarse remedies ' ' 62 
[for the overmuch security in which we love to live]. The 
general truth is simply that a " person, " being by nature some- 
thing more or less isolated, needs temporary isolating and com- 
pulsion to an armed manner of existence : if this is not his for- 
tune, he does not develope. What the nature of the compulsion 
is, or rather must be, depends on the grain of the man. Nietz- 
sche required no wars or physical combats to make him a "per- 
son, ' ' and one of the most individual ones of modern time ; but 
power on a lower level may require opposition of a coarser 
sort. Hence, though it is quite possible that the coming aris- 
tocracy he looked for will be a fighting aristocracy (in the 
literal sense) almost from the start, it will not be merely that; 
the fighting, too, may be forced rather than chosen. Moreover, 
the fighting may be delayed ; at least Nietzsche saw no immediate 
occasion for it. At present, he says, though the new association 
will assert itself in warrior fashion, it will be a war without 
powder, a war between ideas and their marshaled hosts. 63 Most 
of what he says in praise of war (not all) has reference to war 
of this sort. How little physical war was an ideal to him appears 
in his asking whether the higher species might not be reached 
in some better and quicker way than by the fearful play of 
wars and revolutions- — whether the end might not be gained by 
maintaining, training, separating certain experimental groups ? ^ 
His mind evidently wavered as to the probable future course of 
things. One can only describe him as in utrumque paratus* 
Sometimes he has misgivings as to whether we can foresee the 
most favorable conditions for the emergence of men of the 
highest worth — it is too complicated, a thousandfold too com- 
plicated a matter, and the chances of miscarriage are great, 

62 Will to Power, § 886. 
68 Werke, XII, 368, § 718. 
84 Ibid., XIII, 175-6, § 401. 



412 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

very great. 65 The only thing plain to him is what ought to be, 
what he desires — and the fact that we can set the type on high 
in our estimation, and be ready for any manifestation of it 
when it appears ; and also that those who feel that they anywise 
approximate to it can more or less train themselves. 

Of this self-training Nietzsche makes much. Men of the 
type he looks for may heighten courage, insight, hardness, 
independence, the feeling of responsibility in themselves — they 
may live differently from the mass now, and will probably find 
plenty of opposition without seeking it or coming to an actual 
passage of arms. 66 Nietzsche was aloof from the world of 
today, and had and has plenty of opposition. Is not his an 
evil name in the mouths of most men now? I hear little but 
dispraise of him, or at best condescension and pity towards him, 
in America (this quite apart from the ignorant abuse of him 
just now, as one of the causes of the present war). He himself 
had no illusions about the probable lot of men who thought as 
he did. In the figure of Zarathustra he tells us that he at- 
tempted a portraiture of the pain and sacrifice involved in a 
higher man's training — he leaves home, family, fatherland, is 
contemned by current morality, and has the suffering attendant 
on new ventures and mistakes, without any of the comfort which 
older ideals bestow. 67 Nietzsche says of his own disciples: 
"To the men who concern me I wish suffering, solitude, illness, 
mistreatment, disgrace — I desire that deep self-contempt, the 
suffering of self-mistrust, the pitiful state of the vanquished, 
may not be unknown to them : I have no pity for them, because 
I wish them the one thing that can prove today whether a man 
has worth or not — that he hold his ground." 68 These men, 
looking before and after, may in certain particulars anticipate 
the immensely slow processes of natural selection, put aside 
conditions not propitious to them (isolate themselves), select 
influences (nature, books, high events) that suit them, doing 
much thinking on the subject ; they may keep in mind benevolent 
opponents only, independent friends, 69 and put out of view the 

68 Will to Power, § 907. ee Ibid., § 907. 

67 Werke (pocket ed), VII, 494, § 67. 

68 Will to Power, §910; cf. Zarathustra, III, iii; IV, xiii, §6. 

69 Nietzsche remarks that " crowds are not good even when they 
follow you." 



THE SUPERMAN 413 

lower sorts of humanity, practising the willing blindness and 
deafness of the wise. 70 Further, they may concede to them- 
selves a right to exceptional actions, as exercise in self-control 
and in the use of freedom ; they may put themselves in circum- 
stances where they are obliged to be hard; 71 they may win 
surplus power and self-confidence by all kinds of asceticism; 
they may school themselves in fine obedience and in the fixed 
sense of differences of rank among men, altogether outgrowing 
the idea that what is right for one is allowable for another and 
ceasing to emulate virtues that belong to others than them- 
selves. 72 Their manner of life will vary from that of the ' ' indus- 
trial masses" (the business and working class). Industrious 
habits, fixed rules, moderation in all things, settled convictions — 
in short, the ''social virtues" — are indeed best for men at 
large ; in this way they reach the perfection of their type. But 
for the exceptional men whom Nietzsche covets to see, other 
things are good: leisure, adventure, unbelief [as ordinarily 
understood], even excess — things that, if allowed to average na- 
tures, would cause their undoing. The very discipline that 
strengthens a strong nature and fits it for great undertakings 
undermines and shatters weaker men — "doubt," la largeur de 
cwur, experiment, independence. 73 

So may higher men educate themselves. And yet to create 
the whole set of conditions which accident sometimes provides 
for the appearance of great individuals, would require, Nietzsche 
remarks, an iron-hardness, "iron men," such as have never 
existed. Practically higher natures can only train themselves, 
utilize any existing situation, and wait for developments. 74 
Wars will probably come willy-nilly, and though Nietzsche has 
little interest in ordinary wars, serving as they do only national 

"Werke, XII, 123-4, §243. 

71 Nietzsche uses the word Barbar here; he has in mind, as he else- 
where explains, not barbarians such as we ordinarily fear, namely, those 
coming up from the lower ranks of society, but conquering, ruling natures 
descending from above, of whom Prometheus is a type (Will to Power, 
§900). 

72 Will to Poicer, §921. 

73 Ibid., §§901, 904. The (or an) element of danger in Nietzsche's 
teaching is that those reading him may not make these distinctions — 
that one who is only an average man may think himself an exception 
and the weak imagine themselves strong. 

74 Ibid., §908. 



414 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

ambitions and aims of trade 75 [such, I may say on my own 
account, as the present war in Europe] they may none the less 
serve in some measure as training-ground for the future type. f 
But more than this, the great war may come, the war for an 
idea, for the rule and organization of the earth (since willing 
compliance with the idea on the part of all concerned cannot be 
taken for granted) — and to this, if it comes, Nietzsche's higher 
men will not merely consent, they will inspire and lead in it. 
Oddly as it may sound to our ears today, he has a special word 
of recognition for religious wars, and this just because they turn 
on intellectual points. 76 In general, he regards the church 
as a superior institution to the state, since it gives to 
spiritual things the first place and to spiritual men rather than 
men of physical force the supreme authority ; and if war must 
needs be, then it is nobler to contend for shades of doctrine than 
for material possessions. 77 And the great war, the only conflict 
in which Nietzsche is supremely interested, will be one for a 
conception, a philosophical doctrine — not with this as a cloak 
for other aims, but on behalf of it 78 — that conception of an 
ordered world, a rule and administration of the round earth, 
to which I have before alluded. He ventured to say — most 
extravagantly perhaps, and perhaps not — that his ideas would 
precipitate a crisis in the world's history, wars ensuing such 
as never had been known before. 79 The supreme result would 
justify all it cost, and would consecrate those who took part in 
the struggle — for it is bringing death into connection with the 
aims we strive for, that makes us reverend (ehrwilrdig) . w 

VI 

Nietzsche was a passionate spirit and took his ideas greatly, 
and would have others take them so. He animadverts on the 
scholars who are content to sit in cool shadows ; it is not enough, 
he says, to prove a thing, one must win men over or lift them 



75 See, among many passages, Werke, XIII, 357; Beyond Good and 
Evil, § 256. 

76 Joyful Science, § 144. 

77 Ibid., §§ 358, 114, 

78 Cf. Werke, XII, 207, § 441. 

79 Ecce Homo, IV, § 1. 

80 Will to Power, § 982. 



THE SUPERMAN 415 

to it. 81 We and our thoughts are not to be like shy deer hidden 
in the wood, but to go forth to conquer and possess. It may- 
be left to little maidens to say, "good is what is pretty and 
touching"; to be really good is to be brave. 82 The time of war 
may not yet be come; Nietzsche is human enough, Christian 
enough to count it his happy fortune that he lives a preparatory 
existence and can leave to future man the conduct of actual 
conflicts; 83 but war in the large sense belonged to his nature. 
Although I do not remember his quoting Heraclitus's dictum, 
noXejxoS narrfp Ttavrmv, it accords with his spirit. He might 
also have said with Goethe : 

" Maehet nicht viel Federlesen, 
Schreibt auf meinen Leichenstein : 
Dieser ist em Mensch gewesen, 
Und das heisst: ein Kampfer seinl " 

— and he wished to transmit a legacy of this spirit to his dis- 
ciples. Zarathustra says, "Your war shall ye wage, and for 
the sake of your thoughts. ... Ye shall love peace as a means 
to new wars — and the short peace more than the long. I counsel 
you not to work, but to conflict. I counsel you not to peace, 
but to victory. Let your work be a conflict, your peace be a 
victory ; . . . Let your love to life be love to your highest hope, 
and let your highest hope be the highest thought of life ! . . . 
What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be 
spared?" 84 

Nietzsche had his dark hours, as the strongest have, and 
about details and methods he had no settled assurance ; but his 
dominant mood was one of hope. "We children of the future, 
how can we be at home in this world of today?" Zarathustra 
scarcely knew how to live, save as a seer of things to come — 
so did the past oppress him; but atonement would be made 
for the shortcomings of the past and the great Hazar 
be finally ushered in. 85 "Have ye not heard anything of 

81 Zarathustra, II, xvi; Dawn of Day, §330. 

82 Joyful Science, §283; Zarathustra, I, x. 
**Werke, XII, 209, §442. 

8 * Zarathustra I, x (practically Common's translation). 
86 Joyful Science, §377; Zarathustra, II, xx; cf. Werke, XIV, 306, 
§ 136; Zarathustra, IV, i. 



416 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

my children? Speak to me of my garden, my Happy Isles, 
my new beautiful race. For their sake, I am rich, for their 
sake I became poor ; . . . what have I not surrendered ? What 
would I not surrender that I might have one thing: those 
children, that living plantation, those life-trees of my "will and 
my highest hope !" 86 One feels the full longing of a man's soul 
(of one who is woman too in the great, divine sense of the 
word) in language like this. Yet it is not mere longing with 
Nietzsche. He speaks of the " unexhausted possibilities" of 
man and our human world. He is confident that in the long 
course of history the fundamental law will break through and 
the best come at last to victory — supposing that man with 
supreme determination wills their supremacy. "From you, the 
self -chosen, ' ' says Zarathustra to his disciples, "shall a chosen 
people grow; and from it the superman." 87 Indeed, the con- 
ditions for a change in the general attitude exist now — only 
the great persuasive men are lacking. 88 And from the class of 
new moralists, or, as he daringly said, " immoralists, ' ' he be- 
lieved they would arise. "We immoralists," he declares — and 
it is one of his proudest utterances — ' ' are today the only power 
that needs no allies in order to come to victory: hereby we are 
by far the strongest of the strong. We do not even need false- 
hood : what other power can dispense with it ? A strong allure- 
ment fights for us — perhaps the strongest that exists, the allure- 
ment of the truth." And then disdaining that word as savoring 
of presumption, he adds, "The charm that fights for us, the 
Venus-eye that ensnares even our opponents and blinds them, is 
the magic of extremes, the allurement that goes with all daring 
to the utmost." 89 

Itself an extreme utterance, we say. But it may be safer to 
let the future decide that. In this strange world, the unex- 
pected, the undreamed of, sometimes happens. 

86 Zarathustra, IV, xi. 

87 Beyond Good and Evil, §§45, 203; Zarathustra, I, xxii, §2; 
Werke, XIV, 71, § 137. 

88 Werke, XI, 372, § 567. 

89 Will to Power, § 749. In Ecce Homo, III, ix, § 2, he says, in 
speaking of the new hopes and tasks for mankind, " I am their happy 
messenger " ( cf . IV, § 1 ) . 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

SOCIAL CRITICISM. ANALYSIS OF MODERN SOCIAL 
TENDENCIES 

The general moral view set forth in the preceding pages im- 
plies an ideal of social organization — indeed, the two things are 
so closely connected that Nietzsche's ideal has already been 
adumbrated and I shall have only now to make it somewhat 
more articulate. 

By way of preface I may summarize his criticism of existing 
society. 



In a broad, general way, the present is to him a time of 
disorganization and degeneration. Strong, ruling forces — the 
condition of organization and of advancing life — do not appear. 
The old aristocracies are themselves corrupted; they have 
spoiled the image of the ruler for us 1 — that is, have robbed it 
of the dignity and grace it once had in men's eyes. The con- 
trary idea is that of freedom, and under its influence, with 
whatever compensatory features, a vast amount of commonness 
and vulgar egoism has been let loose on the world. There are 
two moments in the secular process of society: (1) the ever- 
growing conquest of larger but weaker social groups by smaller 
but stronger ones; (2) the ever-greater conquest of the stronger 
[within a group] by the mass, and in consequence the advent 
of democracy, with anarchy of the elements as a final result. 2 
We are in the second stage of the process now. The institutions 
in which and by which society has lived and been strong in the 
past are slowly dissolving. Men call it progress, and if progress 

1 Will to Power, § 750. Nietzsche thinks that Aryan blood, whence 
European aristocracies originally sprung, is no longer predominant in 
the Western world — the pre-Aryan populations, a more numerous and 
more social, but inferior breed, having now in effect the upper hand 
{Genealogy etc., I, §§5, 11; cf. Werke, XIV, 218, §440). 

2 Will to Power, § 712. 

417 



418 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

is movement and movement to an end, progress it is — but, to 
Nietzsche, progressive decline. Democracy he calls "a form of 
decline (V erf alls form) of the state. 3 However justifiable, or 
at least excusable, as a temporary measure it may be, it repre- 
sents a form of unbelief — unbelief in great men and a select 
society: "we are all equal," it says. 4 The sentiment of hostility 
to whatever rules or wills to rule, which underlies it, Nietzsche 
calls "misarchism" — admitting that it is a bad word for a bad 
thing. 5 The individual wants to be free, but as most are con- 
stituted, "freedom" is a misfortune for them. European 
democracy is to a certain extent a liberation of powers, but to 
a far greater extent a liberation of weaknesses and other ig- 
noble things. 6 The demand for independence, for free develop- 
ment, for laisser aller is most hotly made by those for whom no 
control could be too strict. 7 "A more common kind of men 
are getting the upper hand (in place of the noblesse, or the 
priests) : first the business people, then the workers." 8 These 
classes, whom Nietzsche puts together as "Pobel," "Gesindel," 
are the "lords of today": for there need be no illusions — though 
they may talk only of freedom, they really want to rule. 9 They 
have their place, even a necessary place, in society, but they 
are a lower type of men, and when they wish to order every- 
thing for their own benefit, their selfishness is only less revolt- 
ing than that of degenerates, who say "all for myself." 10 
Nietzsche refers in Zarathustra to the "too many," the "much 
too many," and it is commonly assumed (in accordance with 
the usual manner of discourse in England and America) that 
he has in mind the vast working populations of our time; but 
he is really thinking of the lower sorts of men in general, and 
it happens (perhaps does not merely "happen") that those 
whom he specially mentions are the rich and would-be rich, clam- 
berers for power, journalists and the educated class. 11 "They 

3 Twilight etc., ix, § 39 ; cf . Beyond Good and Evil, § 203 ; Human, 
etc., § 472. 

* Will to Power, § 752. 

Genealogy etc., II, § 12. 

• Will to Power, § 762. 

7 Twilight etc., ix, § 41. 

8 Werke, XI, 374, § 570. 

8 Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 3 ; Beyond Good and Evil, § 225. 

10 Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 1. 

11 Ibid., I, xi. Cf. further, as to the "much too many," I, ix; II, vi. 



ANALYSIS OF MODERN SOCIAL TENDENCIES 419 

gain wealth and are poorer with it." A king in Zarathustra 
says that he would rather live among hermits and goat-herds 
than with our gilded, false, painted populace (Pobel), though 
it call itself "good society," or "nobility" — healthy, hard- 
necked peasants are better. 12 "Populace below, populace above! 
what is today 'poor' and 'rich'?" "This distinction I un- 
learned," says another character, whom Zarathustra chides a 
little, but does not really condemn. Greed, envy, revenge, pride 
— these are more or less the motives all around. 13 

The modern ideas of "freedom," "equal rights," "no 
masters and no slaves, ' ' are sometimes traced to France and the 
eighteenth century, but Nietzsche thinks that they are really 
and ultimately of English origin — the French being only the 
apes and actors of them, also their best soldiers, and alas ! their 
first and profoundest victims. 14 The ideas played a part too 
in the German Reformation, which on one side was a kind of 
peasants' insurrection, an eruption of common instincts, with 
pillage, lust for the riches of the churches, and an unchaining 
of the senses, following in its wake. 15 Going back further still, 
the modern movement is a continuation and materialistic ren- 
dering of the slave-insurrection in morality, which began in 
ancient Israel and was carried on by Christianity — setting on 
high, as it did, the common man and his interests and valua- 
tions, and bent on abasing the powerful and the great. 

ii 

But whatever its origin and spiritual filiations, the move- 
ment is growing and taking on ever more pronounced forms. 
The long, slow insurrection of populace and slaves (the two are 
almost equivalent expressions to Nietzsche) "grows and 
grows. " 16 It is not that want is greater, that social conditions 
are worse 17 — the causes are of another order. The business 
class have not perhaps much more to get ; but as to the working 
class, it is just because the laborer finds himself relatively so 

12 Ibid., IV, iii, §1. 
18 Ibid., IV, viii. 

14 Beyond Good and Evil, §253. 

15 Joyful Science, §358; Werke, XIII, 333, §827. 

16 Zarathustra, IV, viii; cf. Werke, XI, 367-8, §556. 

17 Will to Power, § 55. 



420 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

well off that he asks for more, and asks it more immodestly. 18 
"Now all benevolence and small charity stirs up the low, and 
the over-rich had better be on their guard! When today a 
person pours from a big bottle through too small a neck, people 
break the neck." 19 Nietzsche was one of the few to see the 
intimate connection of democracy with socialism. They are, to 
his mind, successive waves of one ground-swell. As the demo- 
cratic movement is the heir of the Christian, so socialism is the 
natural offspring of democracy. If workingmen are given po- 
litical rights, it is only to be expected that, as the largest factor 
in the population, they will become the determining factor in 
the state and try to order things for their own benefit: the 
principle of majority-rule brings this species of rule with it. 
In the lukewarm (lauen) atmosphere of democratic ease, this 
may not be perceived — the power to draw conclusions relaxes 
under a laisser faire regime ; but the conclusion is inevitable. 20 a 
It is, indeed, often said that there is an essential difference be- 
tween democracy and socialism, in that the former aims simply 
at individual liberty and independence, or, as James Russell 
Lowell put it, 

" To make a man a Man an' let him be/' 

while socialism would submerge individual liberty under a 
regime of strict social organization. But the socialists are keen 
enough to see (it is really a very old truth) that individual 
aims may sometimes best be secured by social organization — 
the individual first getting effective rights and powers in this 
way. That is to say, socialism and individualism are not really 
antithetical, but play into one another; as Nietzsche says, "So- 
cialism is only a means of agitation for individualism." 21 It 
is but a specious self-surrender to the whole which the socialist 
workingman makes — he gives himself up only the better to 
secure individual rights and enjoyment; the whole is simply a 
new instrument with which to serve private aims. 22 b Moreover, 

18 Twilight etc., ix, § 40. 
16 Zarathustra, IV, viii. 

20 Beyond Good cmd Evil, §202; Twilight etc., ix, §940; Will to 
Power, § 125. 

21 Will to Power, § 784. 

22 In other classes, however, a socialistic way of thinking resting on 
broad grounds of justice is possible (Human, etc., §451). 



ANALYSIS OF MODERN SOCIAL TENDENCIES 421 

without intending to, democratic institutions are making social- 
ism practically possible, for they are putting into the worker's 
hands the means for obtaining his ends. They are giving him 
the ballot, giving him the right of combination, making him 
capable of bearing arms (militartuchtig) . He thus becomes part 
of the political power, yes, in virtue of his numbers, the leading 
factor in it — he can do what he will, at least can try to (for 
there may be a gap between the hope and the performance). 23 

The socialist movement sometimes takes on an anarchist 
form. The final aims are the same, but the anarchists are more 
impatient, wish to proceed more summarily with the existing 
order. Nietzsche has in mind such communist-anarchists as we 
in America knew (particularly in Chicago) in the eighties, not 
of course the so-called "philosophical anarchists" — who are not 
socialists at all. As socialism is a means of agitation for indi- 
vidualism, so this anarchism is a means of agitation for social- 
ism; with it socialism excites fear and begins to have the 
fascination of fearful things — it draws the bold, the adventur- 
ous to its side, the intellectually daring included. Uprisings, 
violences, novel state-experiments are to be expected. 24 

in 

What unites anarchism, socialism, and democracy is the 
common man's impatience of rule, his hatred of lords and mas- 
ters, his opposition to laws he does not himself make, his dis- 
allowance of separate and special claims, rights, and privileges — 
this on the negative side. Positively, as already stated, he wants 
himself to rule, to bring all that has hitherto been separate and 
on high into subjection to him : it is an extreme of self-assertion, 
of will to power — only now not in the quarter where we have 
been accustomed to look for it. 25 Restraint from tradition is as 
unwelcome as from rulers. The tendency is to judge every- 
thing by individual standards, to make personal or even mo- 
mentary happiness the measure of right and wrong. Authori- 
ties are questioned, the aged no longer have the accustomed 
reverence, institutions grow weak, discipline and the idea of 

28 Twilight etc., ix, § 40; Will to Power, § 754; Dawn of Day, §§ 14, 
206; Werke, XI, 369, §559. 

24 Beyond Good and Evil, §202; Will to Power, §§753, 784. 
26 Cf. Werke, XII, 205, §436; Beyond Good and Evil, §202. 



422 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

discipline tend to vanish. On the other hand, the desire for 
personal enjoyment, for wealth and luxury, knows no bounds. 
Nietzsche once gives a formal characterization of modernity: 
absence of moral discipline — human beings being left to grow; 
lack of authority; lack of moderation within settled horizons; 
lack of fineness in judgment; a chaos of contradictory valua- 
tions. 26 They are marks of life in process of disorganization. 
Nietzsche admits that our institutions no longer fit us, but he 
says that the trouble is with us, not with them. We live for 
today, live very fast, very irresponsibly — this is our "free- 
dom"; at the mere mention of "authority" we think we are in 
danger of a new slavery. But in order that there may be great 
social growths and institutions that fit them, there must be a 
species of will, instinct, imperative, which is "antiliberal bis 
zur Bosheit"; a will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility 
stretching over centuries, to a solidarity of the generations for- 
ward and backward in infinitum. Then comes a growth like the 
imperium Bomanum? 

To illustrate what he means, he speaks of marriage. The 
institution is losing its reason today — why? Because the in- 
stincts and aims that have created it and lie back of it are dis- 
appearing. More and more there is a tendency to (Nietzsche 
says "indulgence in favor of") love-matches. But the institu- 
tions of society are never founded on an idiosyncrasy, and mar- 
riage cannot rest on an idiosyncrasy like "love." At its basis 
is a combination of impulses belonging to human nature, i.e., 
strong human nature, as such: the impulse of sex, the impulse 
of property (wife and child as property), the impulse of 
dominion, which continually organizes that smallest social struc- 
ture, the family, and which needs children and heirs in order to 
hold fast even physiologically an attained measure of power, 
influence, wealth, and so to make possible tasks and instinct- 
solidarity reaching from century to century. The reason of 
marriage lay in the sole juristic responsibility of the man — 
thereby it got a center of gravity, while today it goes hitching 
along {auf beiden Beinen hinht) ; it lay in its indissolubleness 

as "Werice, XIV, 203, § 404. The socialist apostles are reproached for 
undermining the workingman's satisfaction with his small round of exist- 
ence and pleasure in it ( The Antichristian, § 57 ) . 

27 Tivilight etc., ix, §39. 



ANALYSIS OF MODERN SOCIAL TENDENCIES 423 

in principle — thereby it won an authority that could make itself 
heard over against accidents of feeling, passion, and the moment ; 
it lay in the responsibility of the families concerned for the 
selection of the marriage partners — the whole presupposing a 
lasting organization of society itself, under whose protection 
and guarantees the family-process could go on. But in these 
modern days, with idiosyncrasies, thoughts of momentary pleas- 
ure rampant, marriage is losing its meaning — hence its tendency 
to disappear. The objection, however, is not to marriage, but to 
modernity. 28 It is but an instance. All along the line tradition 
is attacked — tradition which is the condition of the possibility of 
a continuity of valuations and policies over long stretches of 
time. The whole Western world lacks the instincts out of 
which institutions grow, out of which a future grows. Among 
former means for producing continuity in the generations have 
been inalienable ownership of land and reverence for ancestors : 
our tendencies are in an opposite direction — land becomes an 
individual possession and is sold according to individual pleas- 
ure; it is one more exhibition of our ruling idea of each man 
for himself, and even for the mood of the moment. 29 

Along with this egoistic, momentary life goes a variety of 
lesser traits characteristic of the time. There is a feverish 
haste, an aimlessness (easy turning from one aim to another), 
an over-stimulation of the head and senses (the peasant himself 
being drawn into the cities and their whirl), a growth of 
nervous diseases and insanity, an increase of alcoholism, vice, 
crime, celibacy, libertinism, pessimism, anarchism (they are 
all classed together by Nietzsche), an inability to resist impulse 
and yet a need for resistance (itself a "formula for decadence," 
since, when life is moving upward, happiness and instinct 
coincide). 30 This does not mean that there is not fairly good 
order in modern society — the business classes, the enjoying 
classes, and the general comfort require it. Indeed, there is 
almost too much order. "The streets so clean, the police so 
superabundant, manners so peaceable, events so small, so pre- 

28 Ibid., ix, § 39. Cf. the reflection in Zarathustra, I, xx, on the low- 
ideas of marriage of the " much- too-many." 

29 Will to Power, §§ 65, 67. 

30 Cf. ibid., §§748, 42-50; Werke, XIV, 119, §251; 214-5; Twilight 
etc., ii, § 11. 



424 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

dictable, that one aime la grandeur et Vimprevu." 31 But there 
is little vigor in the social body. Indeed, there scarcely is 
a social body, but rather a conglomerate of egoistic individuals, 
who tolerate one another and on occasion help one another and 
have too much sensibility and pity to do what the health of 
the social organism really requires. For there are unsound 
elements in society today, inappropriable, useless individuals, 
refuse, and society should slough them off (Nietzsche uses the 
word "excrete"). The vicious, the criminal, the insane, the 
anarchists come under this head. Nietzsche is satirical toward 
tout comprendre c'est tout pardonnerF 1 He regards the de- 
mand for the abolition of punishment as diseased mellowness 
and effeminacy — sometimes weak nerves more than anything 
else. 33 The brutal, the canaille, and the cattle should be strictly 
controlled — or else removed. 34 As one cannot carry the law of 
altruism into physiology and put hopelessly diseased parts of 
the organism on a par with sound ones, so with the social body. 
Nature is not to be set down as unmoral for showing no pity to 
what is degenerate, and it is a sickly and unnatural morality 
which has brought about the accumulation of physiological and 
moral evils which we witness in society today. 35 All of which 
is to say that modern society is not properly a "society," a 
"body" at all — being without the normal instincts of one. 36 

31 Werke, XIV, 208, § 417. 

32 Will to Power, § 81. 

33 Beyond Good and Evil, §201; Werke, XIII, 199, §438. Cf., as to 
mildness to crime and stupidity, Will to Power, § 130; as to the anarchist 
attitude to punitive justice, Beyond Good and Evil, § 202. For all this, 
Nietzsche gives no sanction to the spirit of revenge and does not really 
unsay what he had said about punishment before. 

34 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 237-8. 

35 Will to Power, § 52; cf. Ecce Homo, III, v, § 2. 
88 Will to Power, § 50. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION. THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF 

SOCIETY 

I turn now to Nietzsche's construction in the social realm. 
There have been anticipations of the ideal he presents in Plato 's 
"Republic," and practical approximations to it in aristo- 
cratically organized societies among the Hindus and Greeks 
and Romans ; but in just the form it takes in Nietzsche 's mind, 
it appears to be his own creation. In this chapter I shall 
indicate the broad basic outlines of his view, and in the next 
certain political applications of it, along with some of his 
anticipations of the future. 



In a general way the theory may be characterized as the 
extreme antithesis of the democratic theory, especially of the 
democratic-socialist theory. Its fundamental idea is that of 
an order of rank (Rangordnung) as opposed to equality. "I 
am impelled in an age of universal suffrage, i.e., where every- 
body dares sit in judgment on everything, to propose an order 
of rank again. ' ' x There are not merely differences, peculiari- 
ties, varying gifts, but higher and lower among men — some 
should rule, others be ruled. Every elevation of the human 
type has been hitherto the work of an aristocracy, and so it 
will always be — that is, of a society that believes in a long 
scale of gradations of rank and differences of value among 
human beings and has need of slavery in some form or other. 2 
The idea of a Rangordnung is a general one, a and in the social 
realm has only a particular application. It holds throughout 
nature, and man's place in the cosmos is determined by the 
fact that he can more or less rule there — a very weak being, 

1 Will to Power, § 854. Rangordnung appears as the express antith- 
esis of equality and equal rights in Beyond Good and Evil, § 30. 
- Beyond Good and Evil, § 257. 

425 



426 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

making himself master by his intelligence and bringing less 
intelligent forces under his yoke. For the basis of rank is 
power, and nothing else; the Rangordnung has fixed itself by 
the victory of the stronger. 3 In man's body there are ruling 
forces and others which are subjected and turned into func- 
tions — and when mighty individuals appear in society and turn 
the mass into their instruments, it is something analogous. 4 
Behind these natural differences in power it is impossible to go. 
The only reasonable matter of inquiry is whether at any given 
time and place actual relations correspond with them. History 
is a kind of trying out of this question. "Who can command, 
who must obey — that is there tried out," and Nietzsche adds, 
"ah, with what long seeking and guessing and failure to guess 
and learning and re-experimenting !' ' Society itself is an ex- 
periment, and what is sought is those who can command. It 
is no contract which binds together the commanding and obey- 
ing elements, but something more primordial — each side in the 
end falls into the place belonging to it by nature. Nor is it 
necessarily harm for men to be subjected — sometimes Nietzsche 
uses language which suggests quite the reverse. Wherever, he 
says, there is a spring for many who are thirsty, one heart for 
many who long, one will for many fitted to be instruments, 
there a people arises. 5 As stated in an earlier connection, there 
may be willingness to obey, to be used. 6 Yet the first require- 
ment of social existence is men who can command — who have 
the right to. "At the summit of states should stand the higher 
man; all other political forms are attempts to provide a sub- 
stitute for his self -demonstrating authority." 7 Attempts to 
provide such substitutes are common today. By adding to- 
gether a sufficient number of men from the ranks it is thought 
that the leader or commander may be replaced — this is the 
origin in Nietzsche's estimation of the various sorts of repre- 
sentative government. But he does not think that arithmetic 

3 Will to Power, § 855; cf. § 1024; Werke, XIII, 170, § 393. 

4 Cf. Will to Power, § 660. 

5 Zarathustra, III, xii, § 25. Undoubtedly Nietzsche speaks at other 
times as if subjection meant harm. He has different points of view at 
different times, and it is hard to reconcile them — but see pp. 447-8, also 
p. 287, of this volume. 

6 P. 287. 

7 Werke, XIV, 66, § 131. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 427 

can solve the question — there are two different categories of 
men. 8 He would have agreed with Emerson, when, in speaking 
of aristocracy, the latter says, "If they provoke anger in the 
least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge them- 
selves on the excluding minority by the strong hand, and kill 
them, at once a new class finds itself at the top, as certainly 
as cream rises in a bowl of milk,- and if the people should 
destroy class after class, until two men only were left, one 
of these would be the leader, and would be involuntarily served 
and copied by the other. You may keep this minority out of 
sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life and one of 
the estates of the realm. " 9 No one who has read the preceding 
chapters will imagine that in speaking of rulers Nietzsche has 
in mind simply men of physical force — they are not even that 
plus courage and will and many heroic qualities. It is above 
all intellectual greatness that marks the ruler; if he has not 
this, he may make trouble, even if he wishes to do well and 
practise justice. Minds that are not of the highest order 
should obey, rather than rule. 10 

In two or three places Nietzsche presents his ideal of social 
organization in some detail. In the principal passage, 11 he 
does so in connection with a discussion of the Hindu Law-book 
of Manu, but it is evidently his own conception he brings out,, 
although this stands in close agreement with the presupposi- 
tions of that ancient book. After saying that the order of 
castes there revealed is only the sanction of a natural order, 
he goes on to the effect that in every healthy society, three 
physiological types appear, conditioning one another, yet sep- 
arate from one another, each of which has its own hygiene, its 
own realm of activity, its own feeling of perfection and master- 
ship. They are not absolutely marked off from one another, 
but one class is " predominantly' ' spiritual or intellectual, an- 
other has predominant muscular and temperamental strength, 
while the third are those who are not distinguished in either 
respect, being simply the average individuals who constitute 

8 Beyond Good and Evil, § 199. 

8 " Manners," in Society and Solitude. Cf. Will to Power, § 784, on 
the eventual rise of a Rangordnung even in an individual order of things. 
10 Will to Power, § 984. 
1 ■ The Antichristian, § 57. 



428 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

the bulk of the society, the others being the exceptions. The 
first class, who as the most spiritual are the strongest, are the 
supreme ruling class; but they rule by weight of their ideas and 
because they body forth a relative perfection of the human 
type, not in less ways or by lesser means — not then because 
they will to, but because of what they are: they are not at 
liberty to take a second place. They give the supreme direction 
to social action, make the supreme law of the social constitution. 
The second class are their instruments for governing. They 
are the warders of justice, the guardians of order and security, 
the higher ranks of soldiers, above all the king as the highest 
formula of soldier, judge, and maintainer of the law. They 
take from the first class all that is gross and rude (grob) in the 
work of ruling — are their attendants, their right hand, their 
best pupils. The third class engage in manual labor, in busi- 
ness, in agriculture, in science (as distinguished from phi- 
losophy), in the ordinary forms of art — that is, any kind of 
work, which is special, professional, and more or less mechan- 
ical. They naturally incline in these directions, as the others 
do in theirs ; not society, but their own kind of happiness makes 
them intelligent machines — they delight in mastership along 
their special line, though they may have slight comprehension 
of the ultimate significance of the work they do. 12 The third 
class make the broad base on which the whole social structure 
rests, this being conceived pyramidically. 

Three things are to be noted about this social classification : b 
(1) While the first two classes represent the higher ranges of 
human life, the attaining of which is the supreme end to Nietz- 
sche, they are marked off from each other — the theory of the 
first class being specially developed and being that part of his 
general view which Nietzsche had most at heart. (2) The 
lowest class — the great average mass — has in his eyes an im- 
portant, yes indispensable place in the social structure : this in 
contrast with the attitude of depreciation and contempt often 
exclusively attributed to him. (3) There is an organic relation 
of all the classes — each being necessary to the other and to the 

12 Earlier Nietzsche had distinguished the manual laborer from the 
scientific specialist as a "fourth estate" ("David Strauss etc.," sect. 8), 
but he now puts them together in the same class. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 429 

whole: this as against the ''social dualism" sometimes charged 
to him. I shall take up these points in order. 

ii 

When Nietzsche argues, as against the more or less anarchic 
democracy and individualism of today, for the necessity of 
rule, he has not so much in mind rulers in the ordinary sense 
(kings, judges, legislators) as the supreme will and thought 
on which rule is based — that is, the first class mentioned, who 
are apart from and above the political mechanism itself. This 
is perhaps the most novel feature in Nietzsche's social scheme. 
Did not even Plato wish the philosopher to rule, to be on the 
throne? But Nietzsche's highest type of man views ruling as 
beneath him — it is the function of a lower class; he is above 
kings, though his thought is law for kings and he uses them as 
his instruments. In this, in a sense, most secular and irreligious 
of modern thinkers, there arises thus the idea of a spiritual 
power over against the temporal, and superior to it. c The 
state is an instrument for ends beyond itself, and has restricted 
supremacy and domain. It may be best to give Nietzsche's 
own words here. "Beyond the ruling class loosed from all 
bonds, live the highest men: and in the rulers they have their 
instruments. " 13 d " These lords of the earth are now to replace 
God, and to win for themselves the deep and unconditional 
trust of the ruled. ' ' They renounce aims of happiness and com- 
fort; they give expectations of this sort to the lowest, but not 
to themselves. They have an eye to the whole range of social 
need, redeeming the miserable by the doctrine of "speedy 
death," and favoring religions and systems of ideas according 
as they are suited to this grade, or to that (je nach der Rangord- 
nung). u They are a kind of moral providence for men, and 
rule by their moral authority only — though none the less 
effectively. 

And yet this relation to society does not exhaust their 
activity. Here Nietzsche developes, or rather starts upon, a 
still more venturesome line of thought. Its presupposition is 
a distinction between leaders of the flock and individuals, or 

18 Will to Power, § 998. 

14 Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 486, §36; cf. Will to Power, § 132. 



430 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

rather persons, proper. The leader (whether he actually leads 
or simply gives the guiding thought) is after all a functionary 
of the flock and does not exist for his own sake. However 
different his responsibilities and duties are from those of ordi- 
nary members of the flock — and they are widely different — he 
is linked to it, and his supreme duty is to care for it and make 
himself its servant. In other words, the law for the whole is 
still the law for him — and to be a law to himself is out of the 
question. But to be an individual in the great sense, a person, 
one must take his law from himself and not from the needs 
of a social complex outside him. Though, as explained in 
Chapter XXVI, the person is born of society, trained by it, and 
never physically independent of it, he is in a way superior to 
it; he has a quantum of being uniquely his own, which urges, 
and indeed makes it imperative on him, to take the law of his 
action from the interests of that and not merely from those of 
society. 15 The attitude may seem egoistic, indeed, the very 
height of egoism and a self-contradictory egoism at that — for 
individuals are commonly supposed to have their very being 
in their social relations; and yet there is a different way of 
looking at the matter. These autonomous individuals, more 
or less dissevered from society, may be conceived of as a new 
human level — the species rising to a new altitude in them. 
Society may not be the final form of humanity, but rather a 
preparatory stage, a kind of school. It was in some such 
way that Nietzsche felt. The self or ego of great individ- 
uals is to him no mere personal interest (in the common 
sense of that term), but a human interest — in such a 
quantum, humanity itself rises higher, i.e., out of its social, 
gregarious stage into one of sovereign persons, each of whom 
has a dominium as significant and sacred as that of any 
society. 16 

The general character and manner of life of sovereign indi- 
viduals has already been indicated (Chapters XXVI, XXVII) ; 
in the present connection I am only concerned to mark off the 
supreme examples of the type from the ruling class proper, 

16 See particularly a passage like Werfce, XIII, 119-21. 
16 Cf. the language of Simmel and Tienes quoted at the beginning of 
note 1 to Chapter XXIV. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 431 

with whom Nietzsche himself often verbally confounds them. 
I mean by this that he often fails to guard himself, not making 
it plain whether by "higher men/' "lords," "supermen," he 
means the one class or the other. His thought, however, be- 
comes unmistakable in passages like the following: "Principal 
point of view : that we do not find the task of the higher species 
to consist in the guidance of the lower (as, e.g., Comte does)." 17 
' ' The simplest type of organism is alone of a perfect character, 
all complicated ones are faulty, and innumerable ones of the 
higher sort go to pieces. Societies (Heerden) and states are 
the highest known to us — very imperfect organisms. At length 
arises, behind the state, the human individual, the highest and 
most imperfect being, who as a rule goes to pieces and makes 
the structure from which he arises go to pieces. The whole 
task (Pensum) of the impulses that form societies and states is 
concentrated in his inner being. He can live alone, after his 
own laws — he is no lawgiver and does not wish to rule. His 
feeling of power turns inward." 18 "It is not a question of 
going before (with this, one is at best shepherd, i.e., the su- 
preme need of the flock), but of capacity for going on one's 
own account, for being different." 19 "It is absolutely not 
the idea to take the latter [the superman type] as lords of the 
former [ordinary men] ; the two species are rather to exist 
alongside one another — as far as possible separated, the one like 
the Epicurean Gods not concerning itself about the other/' 20 
"The 'shepherd' (Hirt) in antithesis to the lord (Herr) — the 
former a means for the preservation of the flock, the latter the 
end for which the flock exists. ' ' 21 Nietzsche thinks that con- 
sideration for individuals proper began in Greece, Asia know- 
ing only princes and lawgivers. "Morality for individuals 
despite the community and its statutes begins with Socrates. ' ' n 
"Probably never were so many different individuals put to- 

17 Will to Power, § 901; cf. close of § 898. 

18 Werke, XII, 113, §225. 

19 Will to Power, §358; cf. §1009; also Twilight etc., i, §37. 

20 Werke, XIV, 262, § 4. 

21 Will to Power, §902. Here "Herr" has a meaning almost anti- 
thetical to that which it has in the preceding quotation. In Zarathastra, 
prologue, § 9, Zarathustra is represented as wishing not to be a shepherd 
of the flock, but to draw many away from the flock — i.e., to make inde- 
pendent individuals. 

22 Werke, XI, 232, § 186. 



432 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

gether in so small a space and allowed such emulation in per- 
fecting their peculiarities [as there]/' 23 

As virtually stated already, to be independent in this way 
is something for few ; average natures are likely to go to pieces 
in attempting it. 24 It is a privilege of the strong; no one had 
better attempt it, unless he is compelled. 6 Nietzsche suggests 
a variety of ways in which one can test oneself in advanced 
How great the demands are is shown by the challenges of 
Zarathustra to would-be higher men who come to him. Warn- 
ing them that they must have a conscience different from the 
common one and that this will involve inner distress, he says, 
"But wilt thou go the way of thy distress, which is the way to 
thyself? If so, show me thy right and thy power to 
do so! Art thou a new power and a new right? A first 
motion? A self -revolving wheel? Canst thou also force stars 
to revolve around thee? Alas, there is so much loose longing 
(Lusternheit) after high things. . . .There are so many great 
thoughts that act only like bellows, blowing one up and making 
one emptier. Free dost thou call thyself ? Thy ruling thought 
do I wish to hear and not that thou hast escaped a yoke. Art 
thou one with the right to escape a yoke? There is many a 
man who threw away his last worth, when he threw away his 
servitude. Free from something ? What is that to Zarathustra ? 
But let thine eye tell me clear and straight: free for what? 
Canst thou give thyself thine evil and thy good, and hang up 
thy will over thee as a law ? Canst thou be judge over thyself, 
and avenger of thy law V' 25 Such are the prerequisites of sov- 
ereign individuals. Men of this type even practise asceticism, 
and find a pleasure in self-subjugation. They are the most 
reverend of men, which does not exclude their being also the 
most cheerful and amiable — indeed, they represent in a special 
sense happiness, beauty, goodness on the earth. 26 

These supreme specimens of our kind are to Nietzsche the 
ultima ratio of society. It is not man, mankind, that is im- 
portant, but such as they. Mankind is experimental material, 

23 Ibid., XIV, 111, §236. Cf., as to the general emulative spirit of 
Greek civilization, Zarathustra, I, xv. 

24 Will to Power, § 901. 

25 Zarathustra, I, xvii. 

26 The Antichristian, § 57. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 433 

with an immense surplusage of failure, a field of ruins. g A 
people is nature's roundabout way of getting six or seven great 
men. 27 So little equality is there between men that a single 
individual may on occasion justify the existence of whole mil- 
lenniums — one full, rich, great, whole man may complement 
innumerable fractional men. 28 "Not man, but superman is the 
goal. ' ' M And when the higher type appear, they have feelings 
about themselves that would be abnormal in ordinary men — 
they revere themselves, and this not because of any actions 
they may perform that prove them great, but because of what 
they are. h Nietzsche is aware that the attitude of reverence 
for oneself is a perilous one, but allowing for the possibility of 
aberration in individual cases, he thinks that it may be truly 
taken, and that then aberration consists in giving it up. It is 
by this token that a true aristocracy is known. An aristocracy, 
he says, when it reaches any perfection, looks upon itself not 
as a function, but as the meaning and highest justification of 
royalty or the commonwealth, something then for which the 
governing and lower classes may well labor and sacrifice, some- 
thing to which with perfect seemliness they may give extraor- 
dinary privileges and power. Nothing is more contrary to our 
democratic conceptions, and yet in no connection is Nietzsche 
more unflinching. To him it is degeneration, corruption (some- 
thing he defines as anarchy in the instincts lying at the founda- 
tion of life), when, for example, an aristocracy like that of 
France at the beginning of the Eevolution throws away its 
privileges and sacrifices itself to extravagances of its moral 
feeling — though in this particular case, the corruption had been 
going on for centuries, leading the nobles as it had to give up 
step by step their lordly prerogatives and to lower themselves 
to a function of royalty (finally, indeed, to a mere ornament 
and decoration of it). A sound aristocracy cannot act in this 
way, and looks at itself as already indicated. Its ground 
feeling is that society does not exist for its own sake, but as 
a foundation and scaffolding, on which a higher species of 
being may arise — like those climbing plants in Java, the Sipo 
Matador, which clamber about an oak tree, and at last, high 

27 Beyond Good and Evil, § 126. 28 Will to Power, § 997. 

29 Ibid., §1001. 



434 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

above it, but supported by it, spread out to the sun their crown 
and display their happiness. 1 Strange and offensive as this 
sounds to us, it is only in keeping with the tragic view of the 
constitution of the world, which Nietzsche, following Schopen- 
hauer, had held from almost the beginning of his career. Our 
ordinary ideas (at least our democratic ideas) of right and 
justice are not the pattern after which the world is made, 
nor are they the standard in accordance with which society 
must be constituted, if it is to yield the consummate fruit 
which Nietzsche desired. Harm and sacrifice are necessities as 
deep as the finiteness of the world and of its composite forces — 
if the world were infinite, all might be different. Higher 
things live off lower things, because it is the only way in which 
they can live at all — there is no infinite storehouse of power 
on which the higher can directly draw. 

Nietzsche uses the word " castes,' ' but we must not think 
of unbreakable lines of social cleavage. His earlier view of 
movement up and down the social scale is not gainsaid. 30 Rather 
have we already found him in this last period calling peasant 
blood the best there is in Germany (i.e., having most promise 
of real aristocracy) , 31 and saying that the critical question is not 
whence one comes, but whither one goes. 32 He even takes a 
certain satisfaction in the democratic leveling process that has 
been going on, for now that the struggle between classes is 
over, an order of rank based on individual merit can arise. 33 
How men may come up from lower walks in life, he finds illus- 
trated notably in the history of religions. 34 It is true that 
training or breeding (Zuchtung) is necessary, and that there 
must be suitable material to start with, but this material is not 
confined within the limits of any one historic class — a real 
aristocracy ever takes new elements into itself. 35 Just how an 
aristocracy can maintain itself on a shifting, more or less indi- 
vidualistic basis like this is not explained, and Professor Ziegler 
thinks that Nietzsche is inconsistent, now progressive and now 

30 Cf. Human, etc., § 439. 

31 Werke, XIII, 347, § 859; cf. note c to Chapter XXVII. 

32 Zarathustra, III, xii, § 12. 

83 Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 485-6, §36. 

84 Beyond Good and Evil, § 61. 
35 Werke. XIV, 226, § 457. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 435 

reactionary; 36 but his ideal, whatever may be the practical 
difficulties of turning it into a working program, is plain — a 
superior, and more or less self-perpetuating class of men on 
the one hand, and on the other, free entrance to it and descent 
from it. 

ni 

And now as to the place and function of the third class — 
the great working mass. Nietzsche sometimes speaks contemptu- 
ously of the average man, but he does so relatively, not abso- 
lutely, and perhaps the language would never have been used 
save in reaction against the excessive laudation of the common 
man and his virtues which is characteristic of a democratic 
age. 3 ' However this may be, he betrays here and there full 
appreciation of the services of the common man, and sometimes 
gives set expression to it — enough so to lead us to suspect that, 
if he had lived to complete the work on which he was bent in 
his later years, he would have supplemented his doctrine of 
the higher man, which was doubtless his main concern, with 
some adequate exposition of the place and functions of the 
average worker in society . k He particularly says that this third 
class, equally with the first and second, has its field of labor 
and its peculiar feeling of perfection and mastership. 37 Work 
well done, of whatever kind, always has his admiration. A good 
hand-worker or scholar who has pride in his art and looks out 
on life with easy contentment is a pleasing sight to him, while 
he finds it pitiable when a shoemaker or schoolmaster gives us 
to understand with a suffering mien that he really was born 
for something better. "There is absolutely nothing better than 
the good ! and that means having some kind of proficiency and 
creating from it virtu in the Italian Renaissance sense. ' ' 38 In- 
dustry, order, moderation, settled convictions — these bring the 
average man to his type of "perfection." 39 Repeatedly does 
Nietzsche warn against contempt for him. "Let us not under- 
value the prerogatives (Vorrechte) of the average" [he had 
just been saying that every class had its prerogative]. "It 

88 Op. cit., pp. 143-4; cf. note d to Chapter XXVII. 

37 The Antichristian, § 57. 

38 Will to Power, § 75. 
88 Ibid.,. §901. 



436 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

would be absolutely unworthy a deeper mind to consider medi- 
ocrity in itself an objection. It is the first indispensable re- 
quirement in order that there may be exceptions: a high 
culture is conditioned by it." 40 "Hatred against mediocrity 
is unworthy a philosopher: it almost raises the question as to 
his 'right to philosophy. 9 Just because he is the exception, he 
has to protect the rule and to give all average people good 
heart." 41 Nietzsche even uses the word "duty" in this con- 
nection: "when an exceptional man treats one of the average 
type with tenderer hands than he does himself and his own 
kind, this is not mere courtesy of the heart — it is simply his 
duty. " ffl * His appreciation goes to what are commonly re- 
garded as the lower as well as to the upper strata of this third 
social class — indeed, he once hazards the conjecture that more 
relative superiority of taste and tact for reverence may be 
found "among the lower ranks of the people, especially among 
peasants, than among the newspaper-reading half-world of in- 
tellect, the educated." 43 

In one way the interests of the great working mass come 
first, in his judgment. The group is prior to the independent 
individual in point of time (as we have already seen), 44 and 
also, in a sense, of importance. The labors of the mass who 
make up its bulk are the sine qua non for the higher man — it is 
from their "surplus labor" that he lives — but he is not a sine 
qua non for them, and in certain circumstances he may be a 
luxury, a waste. 45 To secure their existence and well-being is 
then the first social requirement. 

In this connection I may mention a curious set of reflec- 
tions to which Nietzsche is led. We have already seen his atti- 
tude to modern — I might say, Christian — civilization. It has 
turned normal or at least ancient valuations upside down — has 
exalted the low and pulled down the high, has made the common 
man of supreme importance and waged war against whatever 
is rare, independent, privileged, powerful (save as it serves 
the common man). "We do not want you apart, superior, in 
a sphere of your own, we want you to serve us" — such is the 

40 The Antichristicm, § 57. *' Beyond Good and Evil, § 263. 

"Will to Power, §893. 44 P. 216; cf. Werke, XIII, 110-4. 

42 The Antichristian, § 57. 45 Will to Power, § 886. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 437 

democratic (more fundamentally speaking, Christian, more 
fundamentally still, social or herd) instinct. For there is a 
tendency throughout history (and quite independently of 
Christianity) of this sort. The weak, so far as they are clever — 
and none may be cleverer — instinctively combine to make them- 
selves masters of the strong; if the strong man is not their 
shepherd, they have no use for him. This is an incident in 
the struggle for existence to which the school of Darwin has 
not ordinarily paid much attention. Instead of there being 
merely a tendency to the survival of the strong in the unhin- 
dered struggle for existence, there is so far a tendency to the 
survival of the weak, according to the laws of natural selection 
itself. m It might even be contended that there is objective 
warrant in this way for the idea of the Jewish prophets that 
God (the supreme power in nature) was on the side of the 
humble and poor. 46 Nietzsche faced the paradox. Nature's 
ways were no model to him, still he had to pay attention to 
them — his motto, amor fati, itself obliged him to. Commenting 
on the fact that the strong are weak, when organized herd- 
instincts, superior numbers are against them, he says that there 
is perhaps nothing in the world more interesting than this 
unwished-for spectacle. 47 He has reflections like the following: 
Is this victory of the weak perhaps only a retarding of the 
tempo in the total movement of life, a protective measure 
against something still worse? May it not be a greater guar- 
antee of life, in the long run ? Suppose that the strong became 
master in every respect, even in fixing valuations, think of the 
consequences. If the weak looked on sickness, suffering, sacrifice 
as the strong do, they would despise themselves — would seek 
to slink out of sight and extinguish themselves. Would that be 
desirable? Should we really like a world in which qualities 
developed by the weak, fineness, considerateness, spirituality, 
suppleness, were lacking ? 48 If not, we cannot set down the vic- 
tory of the mass and their valuations as antibiological. We 
must rather seek to explain it as somehow in life's interest, as 

46 Nietzsche finds the "cruelty of nature" not where it is commonly 
supposed to be: "she is cruel to her fortunate children {Gliickskinder) , 
she spares and protects les humbles" (ibid., §685). 

47 Ibid., § 685. 

48 Ibid., § 401. 



438 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

part of the method for maintaining the human type — possibly 
without it man would no longer exist. 49 The growth of a species' 
power may be less guaranteed by the preponderance of its 
favored offspring, its strong ones, than by the preponderance 
of the average and lower types — the latter having greater fruit- 
fulness and permanence, while with the former danger in- 
creases. 50 Must we admit perhaps that the raising of the type 
is fateful for the species? History often shows us strong races 
decimating one another. At least we must own that these 
higher individuals are expensive. We really stand before a 
problem of economy. Never does Nietzsche question that great 
individuals are the ultima ratio of society, that it would be 
better for the race to produce them and disappear, than not 
to produce them and live on indefinitely ; and yet he saw that, 
at a given moment race-permanence might be more important 
than anything else, since thereby a large number of great indi- 
viduals would ultimately be made possible. 51 

Accordingly we have a kind of apology in Nietzsche's latest 
writings for the present supremacy of the mass and their valua- 
tions — at least the temporary supremacy. "Temporary pre- 
ponderance of the social valuations, conceivable and useful: it 
is a question of producing a substructure, on which a stronger 
race will be possible at last." 52 "Everywhere, where the aver- 
age qualities, on which the continuance of a species depends, 
are of prime moment, being a person would be a waste, a luxury, 
and wishing for persons has absolutely no sense." 53 "The 
process of making man smaller which is going on under demo- 
cratic inspiration must long be the sole aim, since a broad 
foundation has first to be laid, on which a stronger type of man 
can stand." 54 The point is "to increase the sum of force, 
despite the temporary decline of the individual: to establish a 
new level ; to find a method for storing up forces, so as to keep 
small results instead of wasting them; meanwhile to subjugate 
devastating nature and make it a tool of the future economy; 
to preserve the weak, since an immense amount of small work 
has to be done; to preserve a sentiment, by which existence is 

49 Ibid., §864. B2 Ibid., §903; cf. Dorner, op. cit., p. 186. 

60 Ibid., § 685. 89 Will to Power, § 886. 

61 Ibid., §864. "Ibid., §890.. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 439 

still possible to the weak and suffering; to implant solidarity 
as an instinct as against the instincts of fear and servility: to 
fight with accident, also with the accident of the 'great man.' " K 
These last words show, I may add, that Nietzsche is still not 
without his humanitarian side. He really wishes as wide a 
happiness as is possible, consistently with a great aim. We have 
already found him citing an ancient counsel, "When thou culti- 
vatest the land, do it with a plow, so that the bird and the wolf 
who follow after may receive of thee and all creatures profit 
by thee," and calling it a "generous and charitable" one. 56 
Zarathustra's instinct is to love "all that lives" (whatever 
danger may lie in doing so), and tears come to his eyes as he 
watches the setting sun pouring its golden light on the sea, 
so that even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars. 57 
Nietzsche would like every man to have a value, and if there 
are those who have none to their families or the community, he 
wants us to give them a value, to make them feel that somehow 
they are useful — for example, the sick man as a means of ex- 
tending knowledge, the criminal as a scarecrow, the vicious as 
opportunities [for experiment?] and so on. 58 He wishes none 
thrown utterly to the void. 

It is Nietzsche 's attitude to that part of the third class 
whom we are accustomed to call the "workers" that is most 
misunderstood, and it may be well to give special attention to 
it. He is thought not only to despise them, but to favor de- 
spoiling them, keeping them miserable and poor. Now it is true 
that he does not wish them, any more than the employing class, 
to rule in society, but how far he is from wishing, or finding 
necessary, a squalid life for them, particularly in an age of 
mechanical inventions like the present one, will appear in pas- 
sages I shall now quote or refer to. In the first place, he says 
that comfort is to be created for them, that to the lowest is to 
be given the expectation of happiness (Anwartschaft auf 
Olilck). 59 Once he ventures on an extraordinary assertion: 

88 Ibid., §895; cf. Werke, XIII, 120, §265 (" keine Servilitdt! ") . 
88 Daivn of Day, § 202. 
8T Zarathustra, III, i; xii, §3. 

88 Werke, XIII, 201, § 444. As to the criminal, degenerate, and evil, 
cf. Werke, XII, 368, § 718. 

88 Werke, XII, 411; Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 486, §36. 



440 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

"The laborers should (sollen) some day live as the bourgeois 
now do. " 60 It is a forecast that can have sense only as great 
social changes are supposed to have taken place, notably as 
mechanical inventions have been allowed to work a result that 
they have never had under our regime of laisser faire, as John 
Stuart Mill long ago confessed. He drops the significant re- 
mark that there is hard coarse work that some men must be 
on hand to do, so long as machines cannot do it in their stead,* 1 
and he observes that the tendency of civilization is to produce 
the machines : ' ' ever less physical force is necessary : wisely we 
let machines work, man becoming stronger and more spirit- 
ual." 62 It may be supposed too that the struggles of the la- 
borers themselves will have contributed to the result, and within 
limits Nietzsche can hardly have failed to justify such 
struggles — at least so long as the present regime of laisser 
faire lasts; he speaks once of revolt as the nobility of 
the slave. 63 He has this to say about exploitation: "What is it 
that we find revolting, when an individual man exploits others 
for his own purposes? The presupposition is that he is not of 
sufficient value. If, however, we suppose him to be valuable 
enough (e.g., as a prince), the exploitation is endured and gives 
a kind of happiness (cf. "submission to God"). We protect 
ourselves against exploitation by lower beings than we our- 
selves are. So I protect myself against the present-day state, 
culture and so forth." 64 Still more strongly: "When an in- 
ferior man takes his foolish existence, his cattle-like stupid 
happiness as an end, he makes the onlooker indignant; and 
when he goes so far as to oppress and use up other men for 
ends of his own, he should be struck dead like a poisonous 
fly." 65 After such passages we can hardly imagine Nietzsche 
sanctioning industrial exploitation as it often exists today, or 



60 Will to Power, § 764. 

el Werke, XI, 143 (the italics are mine). 

62 Ibid., XIV, 97, § 207. He even says that in the next [our] cen- 
tury mankind will have won, by the conquest of nature, more power than 
it can use, and suggests, among other changes, that economic relations 
may then be ordered without the usual anxiety about life and death 
(ibid., XI, 376-7, §572). 

68 Zarathustra, I, x. 

64 Werlce, XIV, 61, § 118. 

6B Ibid., XIV, 61-2, §119. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 441 

condemning of necessity so modest a thing as a " strike. " 66 At 
the same time he has an ideal for the laborer that may seem 
an extravagance — at least it is not one frequently illustrated to 
him by his employer, though in a different and better civiliza- 
tion it might hold for employer and workingman alike. At 
present he finds men in civilized lands much the same in one 
respect : they work for the sake of the reward. An occupation 
is a means to them, not an end, so that they are not fine in 
choosing one, provided it yields a rich return: individuals are 
rare who must do just one kind of work and would rather 
perish than labor at something in which they have no pleasure. 67 
He indicates his ideal in the following: "Laborers [and he 
would have said the same, I think, of all the subdivisions of 
his third class, employers and professional men included] 
should learn to feel like soldiers. An honorarium, a salary, but 
no pay! No proportion between payment and work per- 
formed! But each kind of individual to be so placed, that he 
can render the highest that is within his reach." 68 

And this suggestion of higher than egoistic ideals for the 
working classes goes along with the scheme of an ordered 
society in general. What Herbert Spencer called the "coming 
slavery" is in some respects what Nietzsche regarded as the 
normal state for the third social class. As unreasonable as it 
would be for single members of man's physical organism to seek 
their own aggrandizement, to be bent on being their own mas- 
ters and becoming something for themselves, so pari passu for 
the lower orders of society. They are necessary, they should 
prosper, but they should not rule. Ruling belongs to the higher 
spheres in the individual organism, and to the first and second 
of Nietzsche's classes in society. It is absolutely necessary that 
the highest intelligence give direction to economic activity. 69 
Here is the reason for his opposition to democracy in any form. 

68 As matter of fact he contemplates the possibility that an 
oppressed and enslaved population might rise and rule and lay the 
foundations of a new culture ( Werke, XIV, 69-70 ) . I do not remember 
any development of this thought, though perhaps Werke, XIII, 212-3, 
§ 497, has something similar in view. It is a different thought from that 
of the migration of the workingmen contemplated in Dawn of Day, § 206 
(see ante, p. 135). 

67 Joyful Science, § 42. 

68 Will to Power, § 763. 

69 Werke, XII, 204, § 435. 



442 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

Universal suffrage means the rule of lower kinds of men — it 
is a system by which they become law for the higher. 70 It was 
introduced as a makeshift, a temporary measure, and Nietzsche 
hopes that it will not be allowed to strike deeper root. 71 It 
belongs to an intervening period between the decay of old ruling 
powers and the advent of new ones more adequate to their 
task. Nietzsche would not even have the people armed — the use 
of physical force should be strictly under higher control. 72 Nor 
would he have them " educated' ' — as this word is often under- 
stood. If the requirements and refined tastes of higher culture 
penetrate the working class, they will not be able to do their 
work without proportionally, and more than proportionally, 
suffering. 73 As I understand him, he does not mean that they 
shall have no intellectual opportunities — indeed, he wishes them 
to become "the most intelligent and pliant instrument possible" 
for social ends, 74 and how is this possible without training of 
some kind ? But the education they receive need not be of the 
sort, nor conducted in the spirit common in democratic coun- 
tries, where young people are liable to have ambitions excited 
for almost any career except one for which they are really 
fitted. Finding out what an individual has capacity for is 
difficult — it is perhaps the educational problem in many cases, 
and I discover nothing in Nietzsche's teaching, which is incon- 
sistent with liberal experimentation in that direction. Perhaps 
our ordinary schools — aside from communicating certain ele- 
mentary forms of knowledge — would be better taken as experi- 
ment-stations than anything else. 

What has doubtless contributed to the misunderstanding of 
Nietzsche's attitude to the working class is his way of referring 
to them as slaves. Some imagine that he wished to turn them 
into slaves. It would be nearer the truth to say that he finds 
them so already, and is simply not unwilling, as many are, to 
use the plain offensive term. A slave to him is any one who is 
not his own end, but does the will of another. I have already 
commented on his broad use of the term. 75 n He speaks even of 
"princes, business-men, officials, farmers, soldiers" as slaves, 

70 Will to Power, §§ 861-2. 7 « Werke, XI, 143. 

71 Werke, XIII, 349, § 864. 74 Will to Power, § 660. 

72 So I interpret Will to Power, § 754. TB Pp. 72, 127, 249-50. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 443 

his thought being that they are all social functionaries, i.e., 
serve something outside them, rather than themselves. 76 He 
calls the French Revolution the "last great slave-insurrection" 
[the beginning of it], 77 and the French Revolution was the 
uprising of the bourgeois rather than the working class. In 
the intellectual world itself, he finds slaves and masters. The 
scholar, the purely scientific and objective man, who simply 
mirrors things and events, is a valuable tool, but a tool all the 
same, "a bit of a slave," though of a sublimated kind — and 
belongs in the hands of the masters in the intellectual realm, 
the philosophers. 78 Nietzsche even carries the distinction into 
the realm of morality. "He who cannot make himself an end, 
or in general project ends of himself, gives honor to an unego- 
istic morality — instinctively": he serves others, takes as his 
rules common rules — that is, is so far a slave, though ' ' the ideal 
slave." 79 What we particularly think of when we speak of a 
"good man" today is a combination of qualities fitting to the 
slave. "Modest, industrious, benevolent, frugal — so you wish 
man, the good man, to be ? But such an one appears to me only 
the ideal slave, the slave of the future." 80 One might say then 
that if workingmen are slaves, they are in what would ordi- 
narily be called good company. There is of course always a 
shade of contempt in Nietzsche's use of the term, but it is from 
a very lofty standpoint — one to which only those are "free" 
who have their reason for being in themselves and represent 
the summits of humanity, the rest doing their best as they 
"serve" them, above all, as they will to serve them, and in so 
willing rob their servitude of half or all its baseness. 81 For in 
one way Nietzsche saw nothing reproachful in slavery, even of 

76 Werke, XII, 205, § 439. 

77 Beyond Good and Evil, § 46. 

78 Ibid., §207; cf. Will to Power, §358. 

79 Will to Power, § 358. 

80 Ibid., § 356. Nietzsche finds slavery everywhere visible, even 
though unconfessed, and adds that it is not to be extirpated, being neces- 
sary; we have only to see that there are those worthy to receive its 
benefits, so that this vast mass of politico-commercial forces is not used 
up in vain ( Werke, XII, 203, § 433 ; cf . Human, etc., § 585 ) . 

81 Either society, or the higher man, who is the ultima ratio of 
society, may be the object of the service; though Nietzsche is of the 
opinion that when the higher man is not in evidence, or at least in 
prospect, life, and the service, too, are on little more than an animal 
level. 



444 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

a literal sort. In an early fragment he remarks that neither 
primitive Christianity nor the ancient Germans regarded it in 
this light. He draws a picture of the mediaeval bondsman 
(Horigen) standing in a variety of strong and delicate relations 
both of law and custom to the man above him, and says rather 
that he looks reproachfully on us ! ffi ° 

Another contributory factor to the misunderstanding is the 
failure to note the distinction between the workers or third 
class generally and the diseased and decadent, the severe lan- 
guage against the latter which Nietzsche sometimes uses being 
taken to cover all who do not belong to the higher types. So 
Professor Dorner appears to construe Nietzsche. 83 But it is a 
misconstruction, though one for which Nietzsche is partly re- 
sponsible, as he sometimes fails to make himself clear. 84 Each 
of his social classes has its own sphere of life and activity, and 
its own type of mastery. The third class is not as strong as the 
upper classes, but it is not weak in any such sense as would 
make its elimination desirable. Again and again does Nietzsche 
distinguish between the mass, the average, as such, and the 
failures, the decadents. 85 Indeed, decadence is not something 
peculiar to the lower strata of society; the decadence of old- 
time aristocracies is one of the conspicuous facts of modern 
times. And even decadence, whenever and wherever it arises, 
Nietzsche would treat with as little inhumanity as possible — 
as we have already seen. But the average normal workers in 
society are another quantity altogether; they are the broad 
foundation of the whole social edifice — there could be no crown 
or apex were they not in their place and doing their indispensa- 
ble work. p 



rv 

And now as to the organic relations of the three classes, 
and the charge of "social dualism. " Undoubtedly Nietzsche 
sometimes uses strong language in the latter direction (he rarely 

82 Werke, IX, 153-4. 
88 Op. cit., p. 149. 

84 For example, in Will to Power, §§401, 461. 

85 Observe the implications of the classifications in Will to Power ; 
§§ 274 r 400, 685. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 445 

states more than one side of a truth at a time, an exception 
being the classic §57 of The Antichristian) , and yet, if we 
attend carefully, we can make out a really organic view, at 
least an approach to one, however unusual in character. 

The difficulties arise as we consider what is said, first, of the 
lower class; second, of the higher classes. 

(1) Dr. Dolson thinks that there is with him no suggestion 
of a social ideal, adding, "the weak can hardly be said to have 
an end. ' ' 86 Professor R. H. Griitzmacher, a Leipzig theologian, 
speaks of his "social, more correctly speaking, unsocial 
thoughts. One of the best ideas of our day, the social, has not 
dawned on him." 87 The well-known Konigsberg philosopher 
and theologian, Professor Dorner, finds his conception contra- 
dictory in that while on the one hand masters and slaves are 
determined for one another, on the other they are hostile to 
one another. 88 So M. Faguet speaks of his creating an "abyss" 
between the two classes, digging a ditch between them; 89 and 
Professor Hoffding uses the phrase "social dualism," though 
he admits that Nietzsche ultimately transcended such a view, 
or rather "took it back." 90 That there is ground for this 
criticism is indisputable ; 91 the only question is, how much 
ground, and what is the real final conclusion to be drawn ? 

First, is it true that in Nietzsche ? s view the weak can hardly 
be said to have an end — that the master class and great indi- 
viduals alone have a reason for being? As I read him, this is 
a fundamental misconception. Great men are the goal, but 
they can only be reached by a long-continuing social process — 
one might say world-process — and all the steps and incidents in 
it acquire significance and justification when taken in connec- 
tion with the great result. The meaninglessness of things in 
themselves, i.e., apart from a purpose to which they may be 
put, was what distressed Nietzsche — a meaningless world was 
abhorrent to him. Yet disenchanted of the God-idea as he had 

86 Op. cit., p. 98. 

87 Nietzsche. Ein akademisches Publikum, p. 118. 

88 Op cit., p. 149. 

89 Op. cit., pp. 332, 334. 

90 Op. cit., p. 175. 

91 Extreme expressions of contempt for the common mass are to be 
found in Joyful Science, §377; Zarathustra, II, vi; Beyond Oood cmd 
Evil, § 30; Will to Power, § 761. 



446 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

early come to be, he was face to face with such a possibility, and 
it was one reason for his pessimism. But ever the question 
surged, could not things be given a meaning — might not the 
world and human society be so ordered and arranged that 
things, all things, would move towards an end, and a great, 
semi-divine one? From this point of view the more or less 
chaotic character that cleaves to things q ceased to be an objec- 
tion to him — it became an occasion for the master-hand and 
mind of man. Amor fati was his motto, but his deeper feeling 
was ever amor dei (or rather deorum). We do not fathom him 
till we reach this undercurrent of his thought and aspiration. 
Let me give some indications of it. "Principal doctrine: In 
our power lies the turning (Zurechtlegung) of suffering into 
blessing, of poison into a nourishment. ' ' "We must take upon 
ourselves all the suffering that has been borne by men and 
animals, and affirm it, and have an aim in which it acquires 
reason." 92 Rational significance could thus be lent even to 
animal existence, but it was the human world for which, above 
all, Nietzsche was concerned. He represents the ugliest, for- 
lornest man declaring after a day with Zarathustra, "It is 
worth living on the earth. One day, one festival with Zara- 
thustra teaches me to love the earth." 93 "The danger of return 
to animality exists. We give a posthumous justification to all 
the dead and a meaning to their life, when we create the super- 
man out of the material bequeathed to us by them (aus diesem 
Stoff), and give to all the past a goal." 94 The higher aim is 
represented as one in which all may unite. "We will create a 
being, we will all have part in it, love it, we will all be heavy 
with child {schwanger) with it — and honor and revere ourselves 
on this account. We must have an aim, for whose sake we are 
all dear to one another. ' ' 95 Nothing less than an entire human- 
ity, so far as it can be turned into an organism working to this 
end, may thus be justified: laborers, farmers, scholars, teachers, 
women as truly as men, state officials and princes, hommes 

92 Werke, XIV, 226, §§ 26, 25. 

98 Zarathustra, IV, xix. 

9 * Werke, XII, 360, § 667; cf. § 678 (" The past in us to be overcome: 
the impulses to be newly combined and all to be directed together to one 
goal — very difficult " ) . 

BB Ibid., XII, 362, § 687. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 447 

religiosi too — every class and every individual capable of func- 
tioning. When then Dr. Dolson says, "the weak can hardly be 
said to have an end," she can only mean "be their own end." 
Yet when, I ask, was it taken for granted — at least before these 
democratic and subtly egoistic days, inaugurated in no small 
measure by Rousseau and Kant — that a man might not have 
an end outside himself and be dignified rather than lowered by 
it? How do most of us human creatures get worth anyway, 
save by serving something beyond us — some cause, some insti- 
tution, some permanent interest, the commonwealth, the church, 
the law — throwing in our mite to the greater result and first 
gaining self-respect as we do so? If we really take ourselves 
as ends, what becomes of most of us? Nietzsche thinks that 
many throw away their last worth when they throw away their 
servitude. No, the "weak" (i.e., the relatively weak, as con- 
trasted with those great and significant enough to be their own 
ends) , all these functionaries of society from the lowest laborer 
up, most decidedly have an end — and that is to fit into, and 
become worthy members of a social organism aiming in the 
transcendent direction already described/ Nietzsche speaks 
expressly of the classes as "reciprocally conditioning each 
other," 96 and time and again of the third class as the indis- 
pensable prerequisite of the first. 

But something more may be said. In a way, the lower class 
does best for itself when it functions in the way described. 
Though in a sense it is a sacrificed class, and Nietzsche so speaks 
of it, the sense is one which the average member of the class 
would hardly know how to appreciate — for he feels of most 
consequence as a social functionary, and would scarcely know 
what to do, if left to himself/ 5 Nietzsche emphasizes the fact 
that his distinction of the classes has natural foundations. Just 
as the physical body has enjoyment when it is well ruled (by 
the higher will-centers), so in society. The strong are as indis- 
pensable for the weak as the weak are for the strong, and 
obeying is a self-preservative function as truly as command- 
ing. 97 There may have to be a trial of strength to know who is 
stronger and who weaker — sometimes the conflict may have 

99 The Antichristian, § 57. 

97 Werke, XIV, 81, § 161; XIII, 170, § 393. 



448 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

sharp outward form (as when the Aryan races came down on 
the European aborigines). At other times no actual trial may- 
be necessary, the results being taken for granted in advance. 
But even after violence, relations of interdependence may result 
all the same, and the two parts of the social body fit together 
with a natural, almost chemical affinity. 98 Much of the mis- 
understanding of Nietzsche, owing to his use of the language of 
conquest to describe the relation of the ruler to the subject- 
classes, is due to a failure to perceive that conquest may issue 
eventually in an amicable relation in which advantages exist 
on both sides. 1 Sometimes, too, he describes the ruler as a felt 
benefactor from the start, one "to whom the weak and suffering 
and oppressed and even animals gladly turn and naturally be- 
long. " " He conceives of Napoleon, not as an oppressor of the 
mass, but rather as a relief, a benefit to them. 100 From a similar 
point of view he advances the idea that the European masses, 
who are now being mixed, averaged, democratized, will some day 
need a strong man, a "tyrant/' as they need their daily bread. 101 
In short, ruling benefits the ruled; social organization is not 
only served by the weak, it serves them. Hence to say, as Dr. 
Dolson does, that the weak in Nietzsche's eyes are "nothing 
but material upon which the strong may exercise their power," 
that he bids the great man restrain his sympathetic and social 
feelings so far as he can, even destroying them utterly, if pos- 
sible, as unworthy of him, 102 is hardly an adequate account o£ 
the matter. In the end, then, there is no " social dualism, ' ' and 
it is a question whether there ever was ; u there is of course a 
difference, even a certain antagonism, between the classes, but 
not to such an extent as to hinder co-operation in the social 
body — the difference might even be said to be to a certain 
extent a condition of co-operation. 7 

The difficulties are greater when we approach the matter 
from the side of the higher classes. Here what Nietzsche says 
really puzzles us. I have in mind now not the ruler class 
proper, though it is what Nietzsche says of these that has given 

88 Cf. the striking metaphor used in Werke, IX, 155. 
99 Beyond Good and Evil, § 293. 
i00 Ibid., §199. 

101 Hid., §242. 

102 Op. cit., pp. 98-9. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 449 

rise to most of the criticism. Whatever their exploitation of 
the subject-class, however rigorously they may rule them, they 
are conceived of as ultimately benefiting them, as being as 
indispensable to them as a shepherd is to his flock (this as 
against the anarchistic, or, for that matter, democratic view). w 
The difficulty is with the class above them, and with them only 
as to one side of their being. For so far as they are the 
philosophers and lawgivers of society, they are organically re- 
lated to it and themselves social functionaries, though of a 
most sublimated sort. x The difficulty is so far as they are con- 
ceived of as independent individuals. For from just this point 
of view, they do not, in any ordinary sense, serve society at all, 
though society serves them most materially, since without it 
they could not live. Here then is a one-sided, not a mutual 
relation — an apparent violation of the organic idea. Indeed, 
they exist apart from society (save as physically, economically, 
bound to it) — that is, they have their own spheres of interest, 
their own occupations — each one indeed more or less his own, 
for they represent the extremes of individuality, as contrasted 
with sociality. In this age we exalt sociality — the tendency is 
transforming economics and ethics, and more or less reshaping 
psychology itself; even theology, formerly a doctrine "of the 
One and Only" is affected, society being considered as not only 
(as the elder James taught) the redeemed form of man, 103 but 
the more or less necessary form of all life. Yet here is a thinker 
for whom the most significant line of cleavage between men is 
as to how social and how solitary they are — and he gives the 
solitary type the higher place ! 104 By no means does he forget 
the original sociality of man, or underrate the educating influ- 
ence of social life, or overlook the secular processes by which 
individuals are at last made possible. Sir John Seeley spoke 
in a notable passage of isolation as the opposite of humanity, 
and Nietzsche would not have contested it as history, or in most 
cases as fact now; his thought is simply that society may now 
and then yield a result beyond itself, that the very education 
it gives the individual may work that way, that from being 
trained to obey he can learn to command, and from command- 

101 Henry James, Society the Redeemed Form of Man (Boston, 1879). 
101 Will to Power, § 886. 



4,50 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

ing others can learn to command himself, and that such ripe, 
self-legislating individuals may well have spheres of life and 
interest strictly their own. 

The difficulty is in making out how individuals so separated 
from society can be organically related to it. For Nietzsche 
carries the thought of independence very far. He distinguishes 
one who belongs to his higher self from one who belongs to his 
office or his family or to society. 105 He counts as individual 
activity neither the activity of a merchant, nor that of the 
official, nor that of the scholar, nor that of the statesman. 106 To 
him the teacher is not yet an individual, and is indeed in 
danger of losing his proper self: "he who is thoroughly a 
teacher takes all things seriously only in relation to his pupils — 
indeed, even himself." 107 Nothing is rarer than a personal 
action. 108 Personal life is something independent of social ef- 
fects. When Buckle attacked the theory that "great men" are 
the levers and causes of great movements, he misconceived them, 
for the "higher nature" of the great man is in his different 
being, in his incommunicableness, in the distance involved in 
his rank (Bangdistanz) — not in any effects that go out from 
him, not even if the earth shook. 109 y His worth lies so little in 
his utility, that it would exist just the same if there were no 
one to whom he could be useful — and it is not impossible that 
he might have a harmful influence, others perishing of envy of 
him. 110 Indeed, to estimate the value of a man by his use to 
others, his cost or his injury to them, has as much and as little 
sense as to estimate a work of art by the effects it produces. 111 
Morality itself (as has been noted in another connection) does 
not affect this value of a man — does not touch the question; 
and whether we preach the ruling morality or criticise it, such 
preoccupation shows that we belong essentially to the flock 
(rather than to ourselves), even if, as its highest necessity, a 

105 Werke, XI, 216, § 145. 

106 Human, etc., §283. 

107 Beyond Good and Evil, § 63. 

108 Will to Power, § 886. 

109 Ibid., §876. 

110 Ibid., § 877. It may be a part of the very greatness of a man 
that others cannot draw advantage from him (cf. what is said of Goethe, 
TiDilight etc., ix, § 50 ) . 

111 Will to Power, §878. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 451 

shepherd. 112 "We must give men courage for a new and great 
form of contempt — of the rich, for example, of officials and so 
forth : every impersonal form of life must rank as common and 
despicable. ' ' m "My thought: ends are lacking and these must 
be individual. We see the universal driving: everybody is 
sacrificed and serves as instrument. Let one go through the 
streets and ask if it is not pure 'slaves' whom one meets. To 
what end? For what purpose?" 114 

Undoubtedly the difficulty of reconciling all this with an 
organic view is considerable; Nietzsche's "great individuals" 
seem separate from society rather than a part of it. And yet 
he speaks of the three classes as "mutually conditioning each 
other" (sich gegenseitig oedmgende) — and this strictly indi- 
vidual manner of existence is the most characteristic aspect of 
the first class. 

Perhaps a way out is in conceiving the organic in a some- 
what different manner from the ordinary. As commonly under- 
stood, an organism is something in which all the parts are in 
turn means and ends. But might there not be an organism in 
which certain parts only are ends, and the rest means to them? 
Is the common conception perhaps an unconscious reflection of 
our prevailing social ideals — a democratic idiosyncrasy? and 
may an aristocratic conception (if we please to term it so) be 
just as biological and scientific? However this may be, it is 
plain what Nietzsche's view is. Great individuals alone are, 
to his mind, ends proper, and they cannot possibly be turned 
into means to ends beneath them ; others are equally means and 
cannot possibly be conceived as ends, though existence and 
happy functioning may well, indeed must, be assured to them. 
If the higher kind of men can be said at all to serve the common 
run of us, it is not in a material way, but in giving a possible 
justification to us, a possible meaning to our existence. With 
them in view or in prospect, taking our place in a social process 
which tends to produce them, we can lift up our heads, if ever 
depression and doubt come to us as to whether our life is worth 
while, — and perhaps there could be no greater service in the 
world to us than this. z 

112 IUd., § 879. See p. 326 and other citations there. 
118 Werke, XII, 122, § 240. 
114 Will to Power, § 269. 



452 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

I may add that the difficulty is also lessened, if, without 
varying the essential thought, we resort to slightly different 
language. Nietzsche speaks of "the social type" and the "soli- 
tary type" as "both necessary"; 115 and "necessary" can only 
mean essential to a whole of which both are parts. We may 
quarrel with him for speaking of solitary individuals as a social 
class, may find it a contradictio m adjecto; but it may also be 
that the surface contradiction takes us straight into his deeper 
meaning. For the solitary individuals are still human: nay, to 
Nietzsche, they are the crown and culmination of humanity. 
Yet if so, society and humanity are not exactly co-extensive 
conceptions — there may be an unsocial type of humanity, i.e., 
society is only a particular form of humanity, not its sub- 
stance.^ Well, this was just what Nietzsche held — and Pro- 
fessor Simmel, with his customary acuteness and profound 
grasp of whatever subject he takes up, has particularly noted 
it. 116 Society is the "redeemed form" of the lower man, but 
the higher man is, in one aspect of his being, beyond it — he 
makes and is his own law, he is not a part or function, but a 
whole by himself. bb The great individual is humanity itself at 
its topmost reach. In one way, every individual may be re- 
garded as humanity, i.e., not merely as an atom, one of a chain, 
but as the whole stock and process back of him as it constitutes 
itself at a given moment (as Nietzsche puts it, as "the whole 
chain," "the whole line of man up to himself") ; but the higher 
individual is humanity risen to a new level, the total life c ■ takes 
a step further with him ' ' — and it is a secondary matter whether 
others, society, profit by him or lose. 117 When, then, Nietzsche 
says that both types, the social and solitary, are necessary, we 
may say that he means necessary to humanity, not society — or 
if to society, then so far as the rarer, higher type is needed to 
give a final justification to society. 00 

The two types, as stated, fit together and yet they are very 
different and they fit together just because they are different. 

116 Will to Power, § 886. 

116 Op. cit., pp. 206-11; Simmel thinks that Goethe made (in effect) 
similar distinctions. 

117 1 am not sure whether I get Nietzsche's exact shade of meaning 
here — let the student consult the passages, Will to Power, § 687 (cf. 
§§682, 678, 785); Ttoilight etc., ix, §33; also Simmel's exposition, just 
cited. 



THE IDEAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 453 

Each has its own law of being; what is safe for one is perilous 
for the other — the social man is liable to degenerate when he 
tries to be an independent individual, and the higher man 
descends when he becomes a mere social functionary. 118 "The 
flock feeling shall rule in the flock, but not beyond ; the leaders 
need their own valuations, and the independent ones theirs. ' ' 119 dd 
And not only the moral, but the religious sentiment may shape 
itself differently in the two classes, and this be well. A religion 
like Christianity, with its emphasis on unselfishness and pity, 
may, if it avoid excesses, be valuable to the flock, 120 though to 
others it may be inadequate, or, if taken absolutely, false and 
pernicious and something to be fought — as matter of fact, the 
higher classes, so far as they have not been themselves debili- 
tated by Christianity, have in favoring it usually done so pour 
encourager les autres. m All along the line, the differences be- 
tween the classes are in the total interest to be accentuated 
rather than diminished. To attempt to bring the types together 
is as great a mistake as it would be to seek to abolish the dis- 
tinctions of the sexes. Fundamental biological needs determine 
sex differentiation — if there were not more or less antithesis and 
antagonism, there would not be attraction ; and the greater pur- 
poses of life determine the differentiation of classes. Nothing 
is more undesirable in Nietzsche's eyes than " hermaphrodit- 
ism/ ' or the Tschandala (his term not for the lowest class, as 
is often supposed, but, following ancient Hindu usage, for the 
result of a mixing of the classes — he would have agreed per- 
fectly with Mrs. Carlyle's saying that the "mixing up of things 
is the great bad"). To develope the distinctly typical and make 
the gap deeper — that is the true course. 122 Even the extreme 
leveling and mechanizing of men going on under the modern 
democratic and industrial movement may have meaning and 

118 Cf. Will to Power, §§901, 904, 886. 

119 Ibid., §287. 

120 Nietzsche says distinctly that his aim is not to annihilate 
the Christian ideal, but to put an end to its tyranny (Will to Power, 
§361; cf. §132, and Werke, XIV, 66-7, §132); cf. G. Chatterton-Hill's 
discriminations, op. cit., p. 136. See still further as to the uses of re- 
ligion for the common man, Beyond Good and Evil, §61; Werke, XIII, 
300, §§ 736-7. 

121 Will to Power, §§216, 373 (cf. Halevy, op. cit., p. 373; Faguet, 
op. cit., pp. 248-9). 

122 Will to Power, § 866. 



454 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

utility from this point of view ; the huge, equalized, mechanized 
mass will create a surplus of force hitherto unknown and at 
once make possible and call for a new complemental race, to 
utilize the heaped-up force in new human adventures and give 
the mass a justification.** Ever is some kind of organic relation 
between the different parts of humanity uppermost in Nietz- 
sche's mind, some as necessary means, others as equally necessary 
ends. ff 



CHAPTER XXX 

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION (Concluded). POLITICAL VIEWS 
AND ANTICIPATIONS 



Nietzsche's political principles are implied in his general social 
doctrine and receive no separate statement. The state was 
originally founded on force and not on contract, 1 though it 
may be assented to in time and obedience to it become a second 
nature. 2 Political power is conceived of as coming from above 
down, not from below up. Sovereignty is inherent in the first 
social class, delegated to the second class (the rulers), and only 
sparingly to be granted to the third (business and professional 
men and laborers). So far as the third class are allowed power, 
it should be as great interests rather than as individuals — and 
the idea is evidently that they should be heard, considered, 
rather than rule. 3 It cannot be too distinctly stated that pos- 
session of power, not wealth, is the distinguishing mark of the 
two upper classes. They control wealth, but the lowest class 
may own more of it than they—they live " poorer and more 
simply, still in possession of power. ' M It is an odd conception 
in this plutocratic age. 

The state, like independent social groups in general, has a 
more or less super-moral way of thinking and acting. 5 Morality, 
in Nietzsche's conception, as we have already seen, concerns the 
relation of parts of a society to one another and to the whole, 
but does not apply to the whole as such. 6 Representing the 

1 Genealogy etc., II, § 17. 

2 Nietzsche even speaks of power being " intrusted " to his future 
ruling caste, their innate superiority demonstrating itself in a variety 
of ways ( Werke, XII, 204, § 434 ) ; and he admits that reverence and the 
nobler emotions have played their part in sustaining state-formations in 
the past (ibid., XIII, 195). 

8 Cf. ibid., XIII, 352, § 872. 
4 Will to Power, § 764. 
6 Ibid., §927. 
6 See pp. 218 ff. 

455 



456 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

social whole as the shepherd does his flock, the state may act to 
other societies, and even on occasion to its own subjects, as the 
individual members of a society in their dealings with one an- 
other may not. It may kill, rob, subject the unwilling to control, 
lie, deceive, entrap, without and within (in the latter case, 
through its courts and executioners, taxation-agencies, com- 
pulsory schools, and police) — acts absolutely forbidden to pri- 
vate persons. 7 In a sense it is ''immorality organized," 8 which 
is not, however, a reflection on it as might be imagined, but 
rather an indication of the limited range of morality. Nietzsche 
remarks that the study of societies is particularly instructive, 
as man shows himself more naive in them — societies always 
using morality [and by implication, dispensing with it, on 
occasion] for their own ends (of force, power, order). 9 In 
other words, politics is essentially Machiavellian — i.e., it has its 
aim (the good of the social body) and does whatever is necessary 
to secure it; its rule is expediency entirely, though to know all 
the depths and refinements of expediency, and to have the 
courage to act accordingly, may require almost superhuman 
powers. 10 A statesman, for example, who does not believe in 
parliaments on principle, may none the less make use of them — 
he may find them extremely useful, when he wants something 
upon which he can support himself, on to which he can shift 
responsibility. 11 The state and the statesman have to reckon 
with much greater complexes of effects than private morality 
does, and a world economy is conceivable with such long-range 
perspectives that all its single requirements would seem for the 
moinent unjust and arbitrary. 12 That a state may do whatever 

"Werke, XIII, 195-6, §431. Cf. Will to Power, §755, where it is 
said that there is an element of violence in law, and of hardness and 
egoism in every kind of authority. 

8 The phrase is, I think, Nietzsche's own, though I cannot locate it 
(I borrow it from Ribot's summary of Orestano's Le idee fondamentali di 
F. Nietzsche in the Revue Philosophique, April, 1903, p. 456). On the 
other hand, it is just for moral reasons that he fulminates against the 
state in Zarathustra, I, xi — but I think that he really has in mind there 
the artificial political formations of modern times (see later, p. 459). 

9 1 follow Faguet (op. cit., p. 240) here, not being able to place the 
original passage. 

10 Will to Power, § 304. In speaking here of Machiavellism as the 
type of perfection in politics, Nietzsche calls it something " superhuman, 
divine, transcendent." 

11 Werke, XIII, 349, §864. 

12 Will to Power, § 927. 



POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 457 

its interests require does not, however, mean (so far as the logic 
of Nietzsche's thought is concerned) that it may not of its own 
accord make contracts or treaties with other states, and then 
be bound by them as truly as individuals are by contracts with 
other individuals. It becomes to this extent in effect a member 
of a larger society, however shadowy and tentative this may 
be, and the ordinary law governing the relations of parts of 
a social whole, i.e., morality, applies to it. States that break 
their word incur the contempt which falls on all liars, as so 
vividly described in Genealogy of Morals, II, § 2. 13 

ii 

Nietzsche is sometimes set down as an anarchist. The Social 
Museum of Harvard University so classes him, 14 and what may 
rank with some as a higher authority, the Encyclopedia Brit- 
tanica, says that his "revolt against the theory of state- 
supremacy turned him into an anarchist and individualist." 15a 
But this view has a very limited truth. He did indeed think 
that the modern world is approaching an "age of anarchy," as 
has been before noted, and he failed to take the situation as 
tragically as some would, for he thought that compensations 
would arise — just as there had been compensations for the 
French Revolution in the rise of a Napoleon and a Beethoven. 16 
Anarchy is an opportunity for master-spirits of original force — 
almost a compulsion to them. But to suppose that anarchy was 
an ideal to him is to fundamentally misconceive him — save as 
to one particular feature of his social doctrine. For the general 
non-political attitude of Nietzsche, his aversion to taking part 
in the public life of his time, is no more to be set down as 
anarchism than a similar "apolitie" of some of the Greek phi- 
losophers, on which Burckhardt comments. 15 When he said, "It 
seems to me useful that there should be some Germans who 
remain indifferent to the German Empire — not merely as a 
spectator might, but as those who turn their faces away from 

*■ See ante, p. 220. 

14 Publications of the Department of Social Ethics in Harvard Uni- 
versity, number 4, p. 8. 

16 Art. "Nietzsche." 

16 Werke, XIII, 361, § 887; cf. XII, 108, § 219. On the possibility of 
an eventual peaceful disappearance of the state, see ante, p. 141, and 
Human, etc., § 472. 



458 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

it," 17 this does not mean that he disapproves of empires in 
general, or that he would not have taken part in the defense of 
the German Empire, however much he disapproved of it, if it 
had been attacked (whether by anarchists or anybody else). 
Even if he does not put political activity in the highest range 
of human activities, he does not question its necessity — the 
place and function of the second class (the rulers) in his 
ideal scheme of social organization alone demonstrates this. 
It is true that he hates "the non-plus-ultra state of 
the socialists ' ' ; and he does not want too "ordered condi- 
tions, ' ' or to take the risks out of life absolutely, for anybody ; 18 
but the ordinary protection of life and property which the 
state gives is something he takes for granted as necessary and 
desirable — he wished rather that the state should do this work 
better, and particularly that property should be more widely 
distributed. 19 

And yet, as we have seen, higher than the citizen or any 
social functionary (whether policeman or prince) is to his mind 
the individual who takes his law from within and has his own 
sphere and quantum of life, more or less independently of so- 
ciety. Here lies whatever basis there is for the idea that Nietz- 
sche is anarchistic. These higher individuals are unquestion- 
ably a law to themselves and above the state. But this view 
has so little in common with what is ordinarily called anarchism 
that it is positively misleading to use this word in connection 
with it. Anarchism in the common revolutionary sense Nietz- 
sche abhorred. 20 Anarchism in the so-called "philosophical" 
sense, had he known of it, would have been almost equally repug- 
nant, for its ideal is liberty for all, the cure for the evils of 
liberty being "more liberty" and so on, while in Nietzsche's 
estimation only the few are fit for liberty, the rest doing best 
both for themselves and for society as they obey social laws. 
Never, so far as I remember, does Nietzsche use the term 
"anarchy" or "anarchism" in a laudatory sense. 21 Laisser 

17 Werke, XIII, 351-2, § 871. 

18 Ibid., XI, 369, § 557 ; cf . Human, etc., § 235. 

19 Cf. The Wanderer etc., § 285. 

20 Cf. the reference to the " spouting and subversive devils," who roar 
for " freedom/' in Zarathustra, II, xviii. 

21 Unless in a passage in which anarchy of opinion is referred to, 
cited on p. 410 (Werke, XII, 191, §410). 



POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 459 

faire, of which anarchism is only the extreme application, he 
almost uniformly opposes. He is here, as in his ethics, the 
antipodes of a thinker like Max Stirner. It is true that he 
made no idol of the state and that one of Zarathustra 's dis- 
courses appears to be directed against it, 22 but if we observe 
carefully, we see that it is the state as contradistinguished from 
a people or flock that he has in mind — artificial formations 
such, I may say, as Austria-Hungary, or in less degree, the 
German Empire, or, for that matter, the British Empire, in 
opposition to the natural formations which arise wherever there 
is unity of blood or race or in the free following of a leader or 
idea. c And yet in peoples and flocks, as truly as in these arti- 
ficial conglomerate states which only force holds together, there 
is order, law, authority as against individual license, in short 
a Rangordnung of rulers and ruled. Let one think of a Greek 
polls, or of a primitive Germanic tribe, or of a people arising, 
as Nietzsche dreams, out of the welter of modern Europe 23 in 
obedience to a great longing and a great idea and under the 
leadership of a great man or set of men — in none of these was 
or will there be anarchy, in the sense of individuals following 
each his own way regardless of the social whole. Only to the 
few can it be given to follow their own way — and even so within 
limits. When Nietzsche said "as little state as possible," he 
meant, as the connection clearly shows, for himself and his 
kind j 24 d he did not mean to say it broadly as Herbert Spencer 
did, or as our modern manufacturing and commercial classes say 
it, when they really only wish to be more free to follow policies, 
of exploitation and greed. For these particular classes Nietz- 
sche wished more state, rather than less. 25 e Indeed, in most of 
the relations of life Nietzsche contemplates the supremacy of 
organized civil society — if he does not argue for it, it is that 
he takes it for granted. I may refer to his views of punishment 
(where the state has an indispensable function as over against 
private vengeance). 26 He would allow some experimentation in 
marriage, but always under social sanction/ 

22 Zarathustra, I, xi, " Of the new idol." 

28 The present war is only a symptom of this welter. 

24 Werke, XI, 368, 567. 

25 See ante, pp. 74, 418. 
28 See ante, p. 272. 



460 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 



ni 

When Nietzsche attempts to make anything definite of his 
social and political views, to form plans or make forecasts, he 
is perhaps not more at sea than most thinkers with ideal con- 
structions who are unable to connect themselves with existing 
tendencies. He was fully aware that he was not in harmony 
with his time (unzeitgemass) ; he really looked at the world 
from afar. In a sense he was more mediaeval than modern, 
even more Greek than mediaeval, and, I might almost say, more 
Asiatic (at least Hindu) than Greek. 27 Perhaps there never 
was a more undemocratic thinker. It is only the notion of 
progress that he takes from the modern (shall I say? Christian) 
world, and this he practically reverses; for progress to him is 
not, as to most of us, towards universal liberty, equality, fra- 
ternity, but towards a graded society, a pyramidal form of 
existence, with the mass at the foundation and men like Gods 
at the top. 

He has accordingly a full sense of the gravity of the situation 
— for him. Not only are political tendencies and social senti- 
ments against him, but morality (as commonly conceived) is. 
He distinguishes himself also from "free-thinkers" — they too 
are levelers. 28g He faces the (to him) depressing possibility, 
that mankind, by following its present watchwords of " human- 
ity, " "sympathy," "pity" (i.e., taking them absolutely, not 
relatively and circumspectly) may become a fixed type like any 
defined animal species — for hitherto the human type has not 
been fixed. 29 How, he asks, out of the European as he is now 
developing — a most intelligent sort of slave-animal, very labori- 
ous, at bottom very modest, curious to excess, multiform, spoiled 
by too much tenderness, weak in will, a cosmopolitan chaos of 

27 Nietzsche once says, as if to indicate what he conceived to be the 
line of progress : " Step by step to become more comprehensive, more 
super-national, more European, more super-European, more Oriental, finally 
more Greek — for the Greek was the first great combination and synthesis 
of all Oriental elements, and thereby the beginning of the European 
soul" (Will to Power, § 1051). 

28 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 44. 

29 Werke, XIV, 66-7, §132; cf. XII, 120, §235. The flock as such 
tends to select those who fit into it, guarding itself alike against those 
who fall below and those who rise above it, i.e., to produce a fixed, sta- 
tionary type — there is nothing creative about it ( Will to Poiver, § 285 ) . 



POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 461 

emotions and ideas — is ever a strong race to emerge, a race of 
the classic type f 30 Moreover, with all his esteem for antiquity, 
he found no exact models for us there, only suggestions, begin- 
nings (Ansatze). 31 We have higher standards than the old 
world; fidelity, magnanimity, jealousy for one's good name (die 
Scham des gut en Bufes) belong, as the result of our mediaeval 
inheritance, to our conception of what is noble. 32 The future 
aristocracy cannot follow Greek nobles, who on occasion would 
shamelessly break their word; although the heirs and bounden 
heirs of all that has been superior in the past, they will be ' ' the 
firstlings of a new nobility, the like of which no age has seen 
or dreamt. ' ' 33 

And yet Nietzsche accepts things as he finds them, and as we 
have already seen, believes that in the long run, democracy, 
socialism, and the relative decadence accompanying them will 
be utilized by, and only make more necessary, the strong men 
of the future. 34 The modern movement has to run its course — 
we may check, dam it, and thereby make it more vehement and 
sudden: more we cannot do. 35 In the meantime and as the 
prime thing, there must be a war of ideas. Higher men must 
declare war against the mass. Everywhere the average are com- 
bining to make themselves master ; we must make reprisals and 
bring all these goings on (which began in Europe with Chris- 
tianity) to light and to judgment. 36 "If things went according 
to my will, it would be time to declare war on European moral- 
ity and all that has grown out of it : we must demolish Europe 's 
existing order of peoples and states. The Christian-democratic 
way of thinking favors the flock-animal and tends to make man 
smaller, it weakens the great impulses (such as the Bose), it 
hates control, hard discipline, great responsibilities, great ven- 
tures. It is the most commonplace who carry off the profit, 
and put their measures of value through. ' ' 37 The task of ' ' en- 

30 Will to Power, § 868. 

31 1 am compelled to rely on Kichter here (op. cit., p. 260, citing 
Werke, XV, 1st ed., 484). 

32 Dawn of Day, § 199; cf. § 165. 
38 Joyful Science, §337. 

34 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 222; Will to Power, §§ 132, 954-5, 960. 

35 Twilight etc., ix, § 43. 

86 Will to Power, § 361. 

87 Werlce, XIV, 226, § 456. 



462 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

lightenment" now is to make not only priests, but princes and 
statesmen so sensible of the untruth of their conduct that it 
becomes conscious falsehood — to strip them of their good con- 
science. 38 "Also in the things of the mind I wish war and op- 
positions: and more war than ever, more oppositions than 
ever. ' ' 39 

But it is as to ways and means for accomplishing the new 
social order that Nietzsche is uncertain and vacillating. I have 
already spoken of this in considering his view of the conditions 
most favorable to the emergence of the superman; I shall now 
only go a little further into detail. Though the avoidance of 
war is theoretically possible and would in his eyes be desirable, 40 
his preponderant opinion is that the higher race will arise and 
be trained in times of social disturbance and commotion — such 
times making them indeed necessary. Labor or socialistic crises 
seem to be principally in his mind — though ordinary wars may 
serve the purpose. The critical thing is that circumstances be 
of such a nature that the new organizing forces must either 
prevail or go under — only in this way will they be tested and 
bring out all their force, and only as they show overmastering 
force will the future (the right kind of future) be guaranteed. 41 
Relatively to the old, sick, moribund culture they will be "bar- 
barians" — not barbarians coming up from the slums and below, 
such as our capitalistic society now fears, but barbarians coming 
from above, of whom Prometheus was an instance, fresh, un- 
spoiled conquering natures who look for material on which to 
impress themselves. 42 It is men of this type — completer men, 
completer animals — who have always been the instruments for 
lifting the human level and establishing a higher culture, how- 
ever fearful and violent they may have been in the first stages 
of the process (instances being the Greeks, the Romans, and the 
Germans) 43 — and they will be needed again. In answering the 
question, "Where are the barbarians of the twentieth century ?" 
he says, "they will appear and consolidate themselves after 

" Ibid., XIV, 206, § 413. 
89 Ibid., XIV, 397, § 267. 
"Ibid., XIII, 175-6, §401. 

41 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 770, 868. 

42 Ibid., §900. 

48 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 257; Genealogy etc., I, § 11; II, § 17. 



POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 463 

immense socialistic crises — being elements capable of the greatest 
hardness towards themselves and of guaranteeing the longest 
will." 44 He is sometimes supposed to preach a "return to 
nature' ' after the manner of Rousseau (except that the return 
is to be to a violent instead of a gentle savage), 45 but he tells 
us himself that it is no "going back," but a " coming >-iip" that 
he has in mind — "up to a high, free, even fear-inspiring nature 
and naturalness, one that plays with great tasks, dares to play. ' ' 
Napoleon was this sort of a "return to nature," another in- 
stance being Goethe. 46 

IV 

Nietzsche's conjectures as to who, what stocks, will lead in 
the future organizing work are various. His horizon is prac- 
tically limited to Europe, which, with all its untoward tend- 
encies, he conceives of as the advance-guard of humanity. 47 
America (so far as it may be distinguished from Europe) he 
does not so much exclude, as fail to take into account. He is 
actually little acquainted with it — though enough to allow him 
to say, ' ' no American future ' ' ! Indeed, he suspects that Amer- 
icans use themselves up too quickly, and are perhaps only ap- 
parently a future world-power. 48 

As to the Germans, he has mixed feelings. The old stock 
was deeply injured in the Thirty Years' War, the nobility most 
of all. 49 A certain deficiency in the higher intellectual qualities 
shows itself generally — "a people that subjected itself to the 

** Cf. Will to Power, § 868. Nietzsche uses language boldly here as 
always; barbarism as usually understood is far from having his sym- 
pathy — see, for instance, Werke, XI, 373, § 569. 

* 5 So Dolson {op. cit., p. 98). Nietzsche's estimate of Rousseau's 
primitive man is unfavorable, whether as to his ever having existed (Will 
to Power, §1017), or as to the worth of the type ("Schopenhauer as 
Educator," sect. 4). 

46 Twilight etc., §§ 48, 49. Nietzsche raises the question whether 
there ever was a " natural " mankind, whether anti-natural virtues have 
not been the rule from the beginning — man coming up to nature after 
long struggle, not going back to it (Will to Power, § 120). He had early 
said in answer to the question how man really finds himself, " Thy true 
being lies not hidden deep within thee, but immeasurably high above thee, 
or at least above that which thou commonly takest as thyself " ( " Scho- 
penhauer as Educator," sect. 1 ) . 

47 Cf., however, what is said of the Asiatics, Werke, XIII, 330, 
§§811-2; 326, §797. 

"Ibid., XIII, 353, §872; 355, §875. 
" Ibid., XIII, 346-7, § 857. 



464 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

intelligence of a Luther ! " m They robbed Europe of the harvest, 
the meaning of the last great period in history, the Renais- 
sance, through Luther and his Protestantism, ''the most impure 
(unsauberste) type of Christianity that exists/' 51 Twice, when 
straight, unambiguous, wholly scientific ways of thinking might 
have established themselves, they found — through Leibnitz and 
Kant — furtive paths (Schleichwege) back to the old ideals. 52 
The nobility itself is almost absent in the history of the higher 
culture — Christianity and alcohol being large contributory 
factors to the result. 53 There has never been, properly speaking, 
a German culture — there have been great solitaries who had 
their own, but Germany in general has been in this respect 
rather like a moor in which every step of the foreigner left its 
mark, but itself was without character. 54 It has clever and well- 
instructed scholars — that is the principal thing one can say; 
in particular, a high-water mark and divinatory refinement of 
the historical sense has been reached. 55 Nietzsche speaks caus- 
tically at times of the smallness and pitiableness of the German 
soul, their " Bedientenseele," their involuntary bowing before 
titles of honor, etc. ; 56 they know how to obey better than to 
command, and if they occupy themselves with morality, they 
proceed to idealize the impulse to obedience. ''Man must have 
something he can unconditionally obey" — it is a character- 
istically German sentiment and piece of logic. 57 Yet, inspired 

*°Ibid., XIII, 338, §840; 340, §845. 

01 The Antichristian, § 61; Ecce Homo, III, x, § 2. 
| 52 Ecce Homo, III, x, § 2. 

I 53 In the Crusades (a kind of higher piracy), the German nobles, 
Viking nobles at bottom, were in their element — the Church knew well 
what it had in them : they were its " Swiss," ever in service of its bad 
instincts, but well-paid ( The Antichristian, § 60 ) . 

54 Will to Power, §791; cf. Werke, XIII, 334, §829; 336, §833; 
also Joyful Science, § 357, where Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel are represented 
as German in their characteristic ideas, but not Goethe or Schopenhauer 
or Bismarck. 

65 Will to Power, §792; Beyond Good and Evil, §204. " In psy- 
chologies the German mind has always lacked in fineness and divina- 
tion" (Will to Power, § 107). 

56 Werke, XIII, 336, § 834; 344, §§ 854-5; 347, § 859. The Bedienten- 
seele becomes " idealized as scholars-and-soldiers-virtue." " How degen- 
erate in taste, how servile before dignities, rank, dress, pomp, and parade 
must a people have been that estimated the simple and plain as the bad 
(das' Schlichte als das Schlechte) , the simple and plain man as the bad 
man! " (Daivn of Day, § 231). 

67 Dawn of Day, § 207. 



POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 465 

by a narrow patriotism and a false racial pride, 58 they have 
made themselves, or allowed themselves to be made, into a nation, 
and have added one more to the system of small states into 
which Europe is divided. 59 With their "Freiheits-Kriegen" 
they cut athwart the possibility of a united Europe which 
Napoleon opened, and brought Europe into the blind alley 
where it is today. 60 In 1870, indeed, they might have attempted 
what Napoleon had, but they renounced the task and com- 
promised with democracy and "modern ideas, " under the 
pompous pretense of founding an Empire. 61 The Empire has 
absorbed the mind of Germany since, and thought and culture 
have suffered correspondingly. The first thing is now to be 
"German," to emphasize "race" — and all values and even his- 
torical facts are estimated accordingly. "German" becomes 
an argument, " Deutschland, Deutschland ilber Alles" a prin- 
ciple, the Germans are proclaimed as the "moral world-order" 
in history — standing for freedom in contrast with the imperium 
Romanum and for the re-establishment of morality against the 
eighteenth century ; there is an Imperial-German way of writing 
history, even "a court style of history (and Herr von Treitschke 
is not ashamed . . . ) . " 62 The exclusive interest in questions of 
power, in business and trade, in ' ' good-living ' ' lowers the intel- 
lectual level. 63 " 'Deutschland, Deutschland ilber Alles* — I fear 
that was the end of German philosophy. ' ' ^ They were once 
the "people of thinkers" j but the Germans of today think in gen- 

68 "One must come down to Wagner in his last epoch and the 
Bayreuther Blattern to find a marsh of presumption, uncleanness, and 
Deutschthumelei equal to Fichte's ' Reden an die deutsche Nation ' " 
(Werke, XIII, 340, §846). "The false Germanism in Richard Wagner 
. . . goes as much against me as the false pictures of ancient Rome by- 
David or the false English Middle Ages of Walter Scott" (ibid., 343, 
§851). 

69 When Nietzsche speaks of the "small states of Europe," he says, 
" I mean all our present states and ' Empires ' " (Werke, XIII, 357, § 881 ) . 

60 Ecce Homo, III, x, § 2; cf. Werke, XIII, 349, §866; The Anti- 
christian, § 61. 

61 "Attempt at Self-criticism," §6, prefixed to later editions of The 
Birth of Tragedy. 

92 Ecce Homo, III, x, § 2. 

83 Cf. Werke, XIII, 350-1, §870; Genealogy etc., Ill, §26. 

84 Twilight etc., viii, §1; cf. ibid., viii, §4, and i, §23 ("Deutscher 
Geist : seit achtzehn Jahren eine contradictio in adjecto " — this said in 
1888) ; Werke, XIII, 351, § 870 (" Germany has lost the intellectual leader- 
ship in Europe; no significant men come from her any longer — for W^agner 
is from 1813, Bismarck himself from 1815"). 



466 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

eral no more — they have something better to do than to think; 
the " great politics" swallows up all earnestness for really great 
things. 65 The era of Bismarck is the era of German Verdum- 
mung. m Indeed, with the new haste and tension, Nietzsche fears 
a premature old age for the Germans 67 — as for Americans. 
And yet there is a natural seriousness, depth, and capacity for 
great passion in the German people. 68 They have the masculine 
virtues, more so than any other people in Europe; soberness 
(Massigung), too, which needs more a spur than a brake. 69 
Wagner is quoted approvingly: "The German is angular and 
awkward, when he attempts to be mannered, but he is grand 
(erhaben) and superior to all, when he is on fire." 70 He is 
strong in industry, in endurance, and in capacity for a cold- 
blooded critical view of things; on account of these qualities 
German philology and the German military system are ahead 
of anything in Europe. 71 Although between the German of 
today and the original "blond German beast" there is little 
connection, whether of blood or ideas, Germans are still great 
enough to awaken anxiety in Europe, 72 and the deep injury to 

85 Werke, XIII, 339-40, § 844. 

"Ibid., XIII, 350, §870; cf. ibid., XIII, 351, §869 ("To be 
enthusiastic for the principle ' Deutschland, Deutschland iiber Alles ' 
or for the German Empire we are not stupid enough"); ibid., 
Ill, 350, §867 ('"Deutschland, Deutschland iiber Alles' is perhaps 
the most imbecile [blbdsinnigste} watchword there ever was. Why 
Germany in general? — I ask, if it does not will, stand for, represent 
something that is of more value than any previous power stood for! In 
itself only a great state the more, an absurdity the more in the world.") ; 
also ibid., XIII, 352, §872 ("Can one interest himself in this German 
Empire? Where is the new thought? Is it only a new combination of 
power? All the worse, if it does not know what it wills. Peace and 
letting things alone are no politics for which I have respect. To rule 
and help the highest thought to victory — that is the only thing that 
could interest me in Germany. What concern is it of mine whether 
Hohenzollern are there or are not there ? " ) . The Empire had helped to 
spoil Wagner; Nietzsche could never forgive him for having condescended 
to it (Ecce Homo, II, § 5). He wished that his book, Will to Power, were 
written in French, to avoid the appearance of strengthening in any way 
Imperial aspirations {Werke, XIV, 420, §304). 

67 Werke, XIV, 211, §423. 

68 Twilight etc., viii, § 3. 
89 Ibid., viii, § 1. 

70 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 6. 

71 Werke, XIII, 338, §840; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §209. It is 
in good part these qualities that enable the Germans to train all kinds of 
mandarins for Europe (Genealogy etc., II, §3) — men, I may say, of the 
type of Lord Haldane in England, and, though they have led mostly a 
scholar's life, Bancroft, Motley, and Burgess in America. 

72 Genealogy etc., I, § 11. 






POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 467 

the stock before referred to has still left sound elements — 
notably in Hanover, Westphalia, Holstein, and, in general, 
North Germany. 73 Peasant blood is the best, but Nietzsche has 
respect for the nobles of the Marches and for the Prussian 
nobility in general — once venturing the remark that the future 
of German culture lies with the sons of Prussian officers. 74 
Though Germans understand obeying better than commanding, 
there are those who can command. 75 In 1888 Nietzsche wrote 
his sister, "Our new Kaiser pleases me more and more: his 
latest is that he has taken a very firm stand against Anti- 
Semitism and the Kreuzzeitung. . . . He would surely under- 
stand will to power as a principle. y ' 76 Moreover, the present 
Verdummung may not last forever, and there may be room for 
greater ideas than the Empire in time; the Germans should 
train a ruling caste on broader lines than at present. 77 

Not unnaturally Nietzsche gives less attention to other Eu- 
ropean stocks — he is less acquainted with them. Of the English 
he does not expect much. England is the home of parlia- 
mentarism and democracy. 78 Comfort, business, and personal 
liberty are inadequate ideals. He sees more of the impulse for 
greatness in the feelings of Kussian Nihilists than in those of 
English Utilitarians — "England's small-mindedness (Klein- 
Geisterei) is now the greatest danger on earth. ' ' 79 But he does 
not think that England is strong enough to continue her old 
commercial and colonial role fifty years longer: too many 

73 Werke, XIII, 346-7, §§ 857, 859. 

™Ibid., XIII, 347, §859; 345, §856. 

75 Dawn of Day, § 207. 

™Leben, II (2), 890. 

"Werke, XIV, 420, §304; XIII, 356, §880; cf. suggestions of a 
new German "Wesen" in Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, 435, §4. Nietzsche 
expresses the wish that Germans might get control ,of Mexico to 
the end of giving an example to future humanity of a model forest- 
culture (Werke, XII, 207, §441). 

78 "Modern ideas," contributory to or symptomatic of the European 
decline noted in chap, xxviii, are ultimately of English origin (Beyond 
Good and Evil, § 263; cf. what is said of Buckle, Genealogy etc., I, § 4). 

"Werke, XIII, 352, §872 (cf. 332, §822). The last statement must 
be in view of England's predominance on the earth — she sets the tone and 
gives the example. As to the first statement, one notices that the last 
English writer of distinction on ethics (G. E. Moore, Ethics), as so many 
earlier ones, makes pleasure and pain the final measure of right and 
wrong. There is a friendlier attitude to English thinkers (though not on 
this score) in Genealogy etc., I, § 1 ; Mixed Opinions etc., §184; and, 
generally, in his second, less idealistic, period. 



468 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

homines novi are coining to the helm — and women may be 
entering Parliament, too — and it is not easy to turn a private 
individual into a statesman with immense horizons. 80 All the 
same, the rule of the earth is actually in Anglo-Saxon hands, 
and Europe cannot go ahead without an understanding with 
England — the German element makes a good ferment, but it 
does not understand how to rule. 81 

Since Germany has become a " great power," France wins 
an altered significance as a power in the realm of culture (als 
Culturmacht) . 82 There is no greater error than to think that 
the success of the German armies [in the Franco-Prussian 
War] proved anything in favor of German culture. 83 France 
is the seat of the most spiritual and refined culture in Europe, 
though one must know where to find it. 84 European noblesse — 
of feeling, taste, manners, in short, in every high sense — is 
France's work and invention. But it was the work of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries, and now the dme frangaise is 
thin in comparison. France has been overcome by England and 
its "modern ideas" — Frenchmen having been the best soldiers 
of these ideas. 85 The French are infected too with the skepticism 
and weakness of will which belongs to modern Europe gen- 
erally with its mishmash of classes and races, and which de- 
velopes most just where culture has existed the longest. 86 Nietz- 
sche evidently no longer looks for leadership from France, i.e., 
in his direction. 11 

Italy is too young to know what it wills and must first prove 
that it can will. 87 Nietzsche loved the Italians and wrote in 
Turin in 1885, "Quousque tandem, Crispi . . . Triple alliance: 
with the 'Empire' an intelligent people makes ever only a 
mesalliance."* 8 He found there "much republican superiority 
(Vornehmheit) " and a way of demonstrating excellence and 
pride without vanity. 89 In the old cities, once states, there was 

"Werke, XIII, 356, §880; 358, §881. 
91 Ibid., XIII, 358, §881; 359, §884. 

82 Twilight etc., viii, § 4. 

83 Ecce Homo, III, ii, § 1. 

84 Beyond Good and Evil, § 254. 

86 Ibid., § 253. 
**Ibid., §208. 

87 Ibid., § 208. 

88 Preface to " Nietzsche contra Wagner." 
88 WerJee, XIII, 332, § 824. 



POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 469 

even among the lower classes an aristocratic self-sufficiency and 
manly breeding (which showed, by the way, that it was not 
necessary, as Germans sometimes said, to have a great state to 
make the soul free and manly) ; "a poor Venetian gondolier is 
ever a better figure than a Berlin Geheimrath, and in the end, 
indeed, a better man. " 90 He finds too the Italian genius able 
to make the freest and finest use of what it borrows from 
abroad, and to contribute more than it takes — this in contrast 
with the ways of the English or French or German genius. 91 

As to Russia, Nietzsche's attitude varies — indeed, he has 
almost contradictory views. He finds Germany stronger in will 
than France, and North Germany stronger than the central 
parts, England with its phlegm stronger than Germany, and 
Russia strongest of all, thanks in part at least to its absolutist 
type of government and the lack [limited extent, we must now 
say] of the "parliamentary imbecility." 92 Force of will has 
been long accumulating there, and is now in threatening manner 
awaiting its release. Russia is the one power that has dura- 
bility in its body, that can still promise something — Russia the 
antithesis of the pitiable European system of small states and 
nervosity, which with the founding of the German Empire has 
passed into a critical state. It is an analogue of the imperium 
Romanum* 3 With a view like this Nietzsche contemplates the 
possibility of its becoming the world-power, colonizing, gaining 
China and India, ruling Asia and Europe — Europe coming to 
stand to it somewhat as Greece did in its later days to Rome, 94 
and Germany, which already owes much to Russia, being its 
advance-post and preparing the way for a pan-Slavist Europe. 
An extraordinary perspective ! And yet he contemplates a quite 
different possibility. From Europe's own standpoint Russia is 
a danger, Europe 's ' ' greatest ' ' danger ; 95 and for his own part 
he would prefer a combination against it. Indeed, he would 

90 Ibid., XIII, 344-5, § 855. 

91 Will to Power, § 831. 

82 Beyond Good and Evil, § 208; Werke, XIII, 356, § 880. 

93 Twilight etc., ix, § 39. 

94 Werke, XIII, 359, §884; 346, §858. 

95 This danger would only disappear with inner revolutions in Russia, 
the splitting up of the empire into little bodies, above all the introduction 
of the parliamentary imbecility and " the obligation of everybody to read 
his newspapers at breakfast." 



470 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

like to have Russia's menace so increased that Europe would 
be forced to combine against it, to get one will, a long formidable 
will that could propose aims for thousands of years — this by- 
means of a new ruling caste that should transcend national 
lines and put an end to the old comedy of petty rival states and 
dynasties and peoples. This would be a great politics for which 
he would have heart. "The time for small politics is past; the 
next [our] century will bring on the struggle for the mastery 
of the earth (Erd-Herrschaft) — the compulsion to great poli- 
tics.'' % There is still a third possibility. It is that of a com- 
bination of Germany and Russia, "a new common program," 
even a mixing of the two races. 97 



And yet behind these varying and more or less contradictory 
attitudes and forecasts there is a comparatively constant idea — 
that of some kind of a united Europe and organization of the 
world. Nietzsche's fundamental problem was human, and the 
utilization and destination of mankind is always in the back- 
ground of his mind. It is true that here also there is no 
definitive (at least definitively wrought-out) view. There is 
even apparent inconsistency. Once we find him saying that 
it is not his ideal to turn humanity into one organism — that 
there should be rather many organisms succeeding one an- 
other (wechselnde) and differing types, each coming to its 
ripeness and perfection and letting its fruit drop. 98 In an- 
other place, after speaking of the struggle between the various 
social units or complexes of power, he says that if law (eine 
Bechisordnung) became sovereign and universal and hence 
were directed against struggle in general, this would be hostile 
to life and progress. 99 But, on the other hand, he speaks of 
a "world-economy," of laying the foundations for an oligarchy 

96 Beyond Good and Evil, § 208. 

"Werke, XIII, 352-3, §872; 356, §880 ("a German-Slav rule of the 
earth does not belong to the most improbable things") ; XII, 208, §441 
(Slav-Germanic-Northern culture — lesser, but robuster and more labori- 
ous! "). 

es jYerke, XII, 204, § 434. If I am right in my interpretation of 
"wechselnde" in this passage, it might be compared with ibid., XII, 114, 
§ 272, where eternal " states " are said to be something unnatural and 
fresh formations to be desirable. 

99 Genealogy etc., II, § 11. 



POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 471 

over the various peoples and their interests, of training for a 
universal politics (Erziehung zu einer allmenschlichen Poli- 
tik). m The "rule of the earth" (Erd-Herrschaft, or Regierung 
der Erde) is a phrase continually on his lips. He has in 
mind transcending not only national, but racial lines and ani- 
mosities. 101 "There is approaching the great task and prob- 
lem: how shall the earth as a whole be administered, and for 
what shall 'man' as a whole, and no longer a people, a race, 
be reared and trained?" 102 The "world-economy" which he 
has in mind is one in which the backward savage races of Asia 
and Africa would be utilized and no longer allowed to live 
merely for themselves. 103 In short, an organic relation of all 
mankind is contemplated — and a law co-extensive with man- 
kind would seem to be a natural consequence. Perhaps the 

100 Will to Power, §§927, 1057. 

101 Cf. Joyful Science, § 377. He is severe here against the race- 
hatred closely connected with German nationalism and with the racial 
self-admiration which deports itself as a sign of German loyal sentiment 
today — something, he says, false twice over and unseemly in a people 
with the " historical sense." While deriding sentimental humanitarianism 
(and in effect what passes nowadays as "cosmopolitanism"), he adds, 
" We are a long way from being German enough, in the current use of 
the term ' German,' to speak in favor of nationalism and racial hatred, 
to be able to take pleasure in the national heart-itch (Herzenskrdtze) 
and blood-poisoning, in virtue of which in Europe now peoples mark 
themselves off, barricade themselves against one another as with quar- 
antine stations." In Werke, XIII, 14, § 28, he speaks of Schopenhauer as 
" one of the best-educated Germans, that is to say, a European. A good 
German — I must be pardoned, if I ten times repeat it — is a German no 
more." Cf. also Werke, XIII, 349, §866; 356, §§878-9. Nietzsche did 
not live long enough to pour his satire on Houston Stewart Chamberlain. 
He holds that pure races no longer exist. " How much mendacity and 
swamp-land are necessary to raise race-questions in today's mishmash 
Europe! (supposing, that is, that one does not come from Borneo or 
Horneo ) ." " Maxim — to have nothing to do with a man who takes part 
in the mendacious race-swindle" {Werke, XIII, 356, §§878-9). Indeed, 
he thought that racial mixtures, if of a certain kind, might have good 
results. For Germans, a Bedientenseele people, there had come an im- 
provement through the admixture of Slav blood — Bismarck being an 
instance; and a general growing in together of German and Slavic stocks 
was desirable (ibid., XIII, 347, §859; 352, §872; cf. the strong lan- 
guage, 346, §858). Particularly did he oppose anti-Semitic feeling: he 
thought that just for the future ruling class, Jews had qualities that 
were indispensable, having in mind especially their understanding for 
finance {ibid., XIII, 352, §872; 356-7; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §251). 
Even " nation," though in a given case it may be more res facta than res 
nata, seemed to him a finer conception than race {Werke, XII, 207, 
§441). 

102 Will to Power, § 957. 

103 Werke, XI, 376-7, §572. 



472 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER 

contradiction cannot be reconciled; and yet it may be that in 
the last analysis the difference is between near and distant 
perspectives, between what is suited to preparatory stages in 
a process of evolution and the ultimate issue. 104 Undoubtedly 
an organization of the world such as is sometimes contem- 
plated today is contrary to Nietzsche's view. For the prevail- 
ing scheme is of a voluntary federation, a consensus of the 
nations — all of them, perhaps even all the races, to have equal 
rights, none to be subordinated to others — in other words, it 
is based on democratic principles, to be applied on a 
grand scale. But Nietzsche does not recognize equal rights, 
whether as between individuals, or between classes, or between 
peoples. The greater man, the greater people, should rule — in 
this way, and not by mutual agreement, do organizing force 
and right arise. As man's bodily organism is not the outcome 
of any consensus, but of the supremacy of certain parts and 
the subjection of others, so with a sound social organism; the 
truth is the same if the organism is co-extensive with mankind 
— the highest brains, the supreme type of men (in body, soul, 
and spirit) must organize the world. But how, we ask, are 
the supreme men to be found out? Well, how are the real 
rulers in any society found out? As Emerson has already 
told us, by trial, by struggle (explicit or implicit). That this 
or that man is the victor is not the outcome of any agree- 
ment — the result establishes itself, the victor proves himself. 
Something similar must go on among the nations (at least 
among the various stocks or breeds — for the same type may 
be in different nations, and it is this, and not whether the 
individual instance is German, English, French, or Russian, 
that is of moment). In other words, for a time, perhaps for 
a long time, there must be struggle, competition. "Competi- 
tion of all egos to find the thought that shall stand over man- 
kind as its star" — such is a perspective or philosophy of his- 
tory that Nietzsche once gives, 105 at least of history as it should 
be and may come to be. "Competition for the control of the 
power that mankind represents — this is the competition to 

104 Cf., for instance, the apparently contradictory views as to the 
origin of the state (ante, p. 448, and note t). 

105 Werke, XII, 360, § 679. 



POLITICAL VIEWS AND ANTICIPATIONS 473 

which Zarathustra calls," is another statement. 106 Wars for 
conceptions, for fundamental philosophical doctrines, will be 
the wars of the future, i.e., those that signify anything. 107 It 
follows that peace between the different nations and stocks on 
the earth as they exist now, a mutual agreement to live and 
let live, universal brotherhood, is undesirable and would cut 
athwart the law of life and progress. 108 Yet in the end, when, 
as a result of competition and conflict, those really fitted to 
organize the world had proved themselves and accomplished 
their work, a different situation would arise and a universal 
reign of law would seem to be inevitable. I say "in the 
end," though in fact there might be end beyond end, the 
work of organization never being perfect, the completely 
ordered world remaining forever an ideal. In that case strug- 
gle and competition would ever and anon arise afresh. 

106 Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 486, §39. 

lor Werke, XII, 207, § 441. 

108 Nietzsche's recognition of this does not exclude a belief in inter- 
national associations of a variety of kinds. He wished as many of them 
as possible, to the end of accustoming men to world-perspectives (see 
Werke, XIII, 362, §891; cf. ibid., 359, §883, as to freedom of travel 
enabling groups of like-minded men to come together and found fellow- 
ships ) . He even looked for a new international language — devised at the 
start for commercial purposes, then utilizable for intellectual intercourse; 
it might be long before it came, but it was as certain as the navigation 
of the air {Human, etc., §267). 



EPILOGUE 

A distinguished German theologian, Dr. Heinrich Weinel, 
speaks of Nietzsche's philosophy as "the history of his life," 
adding, "The important thing in the last instance is not that 
we refute him — but that we understand him. For to under- 
stand him is to overcome him. " 1 If any feel that they have 
been helped to a better understanding of Nietzsche by reading 
these pages, I shall be glad — whether they are proportionally 
nearer to overcoming him, I leave it to them to say. 
1 Ibsen, Bjornson, Nietzsche, p. 143. 



474 



NOTES 

CHAPTER I 

a There is this modicum of truth in the extravagant statement of 
the Encyclopedia Britannica, art. " Nietzsche," " Revolt against the whole 
civilized [sic] environment in which he was brought up is the keynote of 
Nietzsche's literary career." On the other hand, R. M. Meyer finds in him 
a reflection of the voluntaristic tendency, both theoretical and practical, 
of the nineteenth century. " This is accordingly Nietzsche's point of 
departure : there are beings who ' will.' At Descartes' proposition, ' I 

think ' he had to shrug his shoulders critically. For not in vain 

is Nietzsche a child of the time, in which Treitschke reduced all politics 
to will to power — and Bismarck lived Treitschke's politics. Not in vain 
a child of the time, for which * willing ' was equivalent to 'willing to 
effect,' 'willing to create'; in which young Disraeli declared, 'What I 
teach I will accomplish'; in which men of force {Kraftnaturen) like 
Gambetta, Lassalle, Mazzini, Garibaldi had vital influence on tens of 
thousands" (Nietzsche, sein Leben und seine Werke, pp. 679-80). Cf. 
also August Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche und Naturalismus, p. 191. 

to As to the political movement of the Germans, see pp. 466-7 of this 
volume. 

c He said the same of Schopenhauer, adding, " The Germans have 
no finger for us, they have in general no fingers, only paws." Cf ., as 
to his differences with German idealists, Werke, XIII, 337-8, § 838. 

dAs to German soldiers, see the discriminating article by Julius Bab 
in Die Eilfe, December 31, 1915, " Friedrich Nietzsche und die deutsche 
Gegenwart." Stephen Graham is of the opinion ( he says " sure " ) that 
" many British soldiers who have rifles on their shoulders today have 
learned of Nietzsche and have a warm place in their hearts for him " 
{Russia and the World, 1915, p. 138). 

e Havelock Ellis and the late William Wallace published valuable 
short studies of Nietzsche at an early date. 

f Cf . Karl Joel, Nietzsche und die Romantik, p. 328 ; Henri Lichten- 
berger, La Philosophie de Nietzsche, pp. 83 ff. ; R. Richter, Friedrich 
Nietzsche, sein Leben und sein Werk (2d ed.), pp. 91 fF. ; H. Vaihinger, 
Nietzsche als Philosoph, p. 16; Ernst Horneffer, Nietzsches letztes 
Schaffen, p. 20; August Dorner, op. cit., pp. 118, 122 n.; R. H. Griitz- 
macher, Nietzsche, ein akademisches Publikum, pp. 49-52; H. Hoffding, 
Moderne Philosophen, p. 145; R. M. Meyer, op. cit., passim. For an 
instance of arbitrary judgment in the matter, see George Saintsbury's 
The Later Nineteenth Century, p. 244; History of Criticism, pp. 582-4. 
Houston Stewart Chamberlain {Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahr- 
hunderts, I, xxv) even says that Nietzsche became a victim of madness, 
when he fell away from Wagner! More reasonable, or at least reasoned, 
conjectures appear in Theobald Ziegler's Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 20, and 
P. J. Mobius' Nietzsche, passim. On the other hand, William Wallace 
and Havelock Ellis saw the facts as they were at the outset. A state- 
ment of Julius Kaftan, a not over-friendly critic who was with Nietzsche 
in Sils-Maria for three weeks in the late summer of 1888, is interesting: 
" I have during the whole time never perceived any trace whatever of 
an incipient mental derangement." At the same time, Nietzsche himself 
appears to have had a foreboding at times of some sort of a collapse, 

475 



476 NOTES 

writing once to a friend, " The fearful and almost unceasing sufferings 
of my life allow me to long for the end, and according to some indications 
the stroke of the brain that will release me (der erlosende Hirnschlag) 
is near enough to warrant my hope. So far as torture and renunciation 
are concerned, I may measure the life of my last years with that of any 
ascetic of any time " ( I am unable to locate this letter, and borrow the 
quotation from Richard Beyer, Nietzsches Versuch einer Umwerthung 
aller Werthe, pp. 34-5). 

gHavelock Ellis (Affirmations, p. 11) quotes this. Some years later 
(1876), FJdouard Schure saw him in Bayreuth and describes his impres- 
sion as follows : " In talking with him I was struck by the superiority 
of his intellect and by the strangeness of his physiognomy. A broad 
forehead, short hair brushed back, the prominent cheekbones of the Slav. 
The heavy, drooping mustache and the bold cut of the face would have 
given him the aspect of a cavalry officer, if there had not been something 
at once timid and haughty in his air. The musical voice and slow speech 
indicated the artist's organization, while the circumspect meditative car- 
riage was that of a philosopher. Nothing more deceptive than the ap- 
parent calm of his expression. The fixed eye revealed the painful travail 
of thought. It was at once the eye of an acute observer and of a fanatical 
visionary. The double character of the gaze produced a disquieted and 
•disquieting expression, all the more so since it seemed to be always fixed 
on a single point. In moments of effusion the gaze was softened to a 
dream-like sweetness, but soon became hostile again. His whole appear- 
ance had the distant air, the discreet and veiled disdain which often 
characterizes aristocrats of thought" (Revue des deux mondes, August 15, 
1895, pp. 782-3). 

h It is Nietzsche's own story, as narrated by P. Deussen, Erin- 
nerungen an F. Nietzsche, p. 24. 

i Cf. Mobius, op. cit., p. 50. See, however, R. H. Griitzmacher, op. 
cit., pp. 16, 17. R. Freiherr von Seydlitz, who knew Nietzsche well, 
says, " One thing was lacking in him which accompanies the ' great 
man' as ordinarily understood: he had no dark, ignoble sides to his 
nature — not even 'sensual coarseness'" (Der neue deutsche Rundschau, 
June, 1899, p. 627). 

i H. L. Mencken says that Nietzsche " fell in love " with Fraulein 
Lou Salome, and " pursued her over half of Europe when she fled " ( The 
Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 42). Both of these statements are 
exaggerations. Meyer, the best all-round authority on Nietzsche, remarks 
that there is no indication of warmer feelings in the case than those of 
friendship, and that Nietzsche thought of her rather as a wife for his 
friend Paul Ree (op. cit., p. 168). Nietzsche did once (spring of 1876) 
make an offer of marriage to a young Dutch woman, but she was already 
engaged (the letters are given by Meyer, op. cit., 156-9). See further a 
summary of Nietzsche's various views, and half-formed wishes, on the 
subject of marriage for himself, by Richter, op. cit., p. 59. 

k I have to borrow here from Riehl, op. cit., p. 23. Cf . the apt 
remarks of A. Wolf, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, p. 23. 

1 Meyer ascribes it in part to the influence of Ree (op. cit-., p. 153 — 
cf. the fuller discussion of the subject, pp. 295-300, where Meyer ques- 
tions the inference often drawn that Nietzsche was naturally unsys- 
tematic ) . 

m So in a letter to Georg Brandes, April 10, 1888, referring to some 
unspecified year in the past. Meyer (op. cit., p. 161) says that there 
were 118 sick days in 1879. After the autumn of 1881, Nietzsche did 
better — for in 1888 he said that in the previous six years he had never had 
during each year less than five or more than fifteen bad days (so his 
sister, Werke, pocket ed., VI, xxviii ) . 



NOTES 477 

CHAPTER II 

a So Mobius, op. cit., p. 28; Ziegler, op. cit., p. 113. 

b What Nietzsche thought of style is hinted at in his remark that 
the only way to improve one's style is to improve one's thought (The 
Wanderer etc., §131; cf. Meyer's admirable remarks, op. cit., p. 628). 
At the same time, there is no doubt that he had fine feeling in this 
direction. Joel compares him with Goethe, finding him greater in so 
far as he is more conscious — Goethe's style flowing like nature, Nietzsche's 
being more art {op. cit., pp. 359-61). Even Saintsbury, after referring 
to Nietzsche's mention of Leopardi, Emerson, Merimee, and Landor as 
the four masters of prose in the nineteenth century, says that he is to 
be put along with them (op. cit., p. 245). Nietzsche's style — in one 
particular, at least — might be described as seductive, like Newman's in 
the Apologia and many of the Sermons: for the moment at least you 
would like to believe what he says. On the other hand, Meyer notes his 
occasional slips and negligences of style, and the tastelessness of some 
of the word-constructions in Zarathustra (op. cit., pp. 624, 416). 

c Cf. Rudolph Eisler, Nietzsches Erkenntnisstheorie und Metaphysik; 
Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Friedrich Nietzsche und das Erkenntnissproblem ; 
Siegbert Flemming, Nietzsches Metaphysik und ihr Verhdltniss zu 
Erkenntnisstheorie und Ethik; also special articles, such as " Friedrich 
Nietzsches Erkenntnisstheorie," by P. Mauritius Demuth, Philosophisches 
Jahrbuch (Gorres-Gesellschaft), October, 1913. Rene Berthelot makes an 
extended critical examination of Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in JJn 
romantisme utilitaire, Vol. I, pp. 33-193. 

dCf. Meyer's view, op. cit., pp. 293, 298, 306, 378, and Ziegler's 
("more thinker than poet"), op. cit., p. 21. On the other hand, Heinrich 
Weinel says, " Whoever allows himself to be persuaded that he [Nietzsche] 
is a man of strict science will observe with astonishment how easy to 
refute Nietzsche is, how full of leaps and contradictions his thinking is, 
even when one clearly separates the epochs of his activity" (Ibsen, 
Bjornson, Nietzsche, pp. 13, 14). Similarly, Oswald Kulpe, "The sterner 
philosophical disciplines, such as logic and the theory of knowledge, 
Nietzsche touched upon only casually, and never gave himself up to their 
problems with original interest; and in the other branches, which he 
liked to cultivate, such as metaphysics and ethics, he has no exact results 
to offer. We cannot, therefore, call him a philosopher" (Philosophy of 
the Present in Germany, p. 128). It must be freely conceded that Nietz- 
sche gives us little in the form of strict science, also that he published 
"no exact results"; whether this prevents his being a substantially con- 
sistent thinker with a tolerably definite outcome of thought, is another 
question. 

e A. K. Rogers strangely misconceives Nietzsche at this point (Phi- 
losophical Review, January, 1912, p. 39). 

f So Kurt Breysig, Jahrbuch fur Gesetzgebung, II (1896), p. 20; 
contrast Meyer's explanations, op. cit., p. 448. 

gCf. Paul Lanzky's account of Nietzsche's habits, as given in D. 
ifalevy's La Vie de Frederic Nietzsche, p. 305. 

CHAPTER III 

a Among philologists he refers to the " renowned Lobeck " in par- 
ticular. His own view of Dionysus is set forth in The Birth of Tragedy, 
and he notes that Burckhardt, whom he calls the profoundest connoisseur 
(Kenner) of Greek culture then living, afterwards added to his Cultur der 
Griechen [the published title is Griechische Kulturgeschichte] a section 



478 NOTES 

on the phenomenon, with the implication that Burckhardt had been more 
or less influenced by him. I may add that Nietzsche's intimate friend, 
with whom, however, he eventually had a falling out, Erwin Rohde, de- 
veloped a similar view, with great wealth of scholarly detail in his Psyche, 
published after Nietzsche's collapse and with no reference to him. 

t> See North American Review, August, 1915, p. 202; cf. letters to 
Deussen and Peter Gast, Brief e, I, 536; IV, 426. 

c See Freiherr von Seydlitz's article, Neue deutsche Rundschau, June, 
1899, p. 622. 

d Cf . Lou Andreas-Salome" (Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, p. 
16) on loneliness and suffering as two great features of Nietzsche's 
destiny, which became more strongly marked as he approached his end, and 
were at once a necessity and a choice. On his early loneliness, see letters 
to Erwin Rohde from Leipzig and Basel (1869), Brief e, II, 135, 156. 

e Cf. the lines from " Aus hohen Bergen," appended to Beyond Good 
and Evil : 

"ihr alten Freunde! Seht! Nun blickt ihr bleich, 
Toll Lieb' und Grausen! 
Nein, geht! Zurnt nichtl Hier — kbnntet ihr nicht hausen; 
Hier zwischen fernsten Eis- und Felsenreich — 
Hier muss man Jdger sein und gemsengleich." 

f Nietzsche's wish to communicate himself, to be heard (if not for 
disciples in the literal sense) appears in Werke, XIV, 355-6, 381, 393. 
He even expresses a wish for disciples in a letter to Peter Gast, August 26, 
1883, and speaks of his writings as bait which he had used to this end. 
His longing for friends, who should really share his thoughts, is touch- 
ingly evidenced in " Aus hohen Bergen," appended to Beyond Good and 
Evil. 

s Nietzsche says (in a letter to Brandes, November 29, 1888), that he 
writes in Ecce Homo with " Cynismus " — i.e., cold-blooded indifference to 
what others will think of him. He also says (to Gast, November 26, 1888) 
that the book is full of jokes and malice {reich an Scherzen und 
Bosheiten ) . 

kAt this point Emily Hamblen is mistaken in her excellent little 
book, Friedrich Nietzsche and his New Gospel, p. 11. It is the general 
impression — cf . A. G. Gardiner, " In the end Nietzsche became his own 
Superman. His autobiographical Ecce Homo was a grotesque exaltation 
of his own achievements, etc." (The War Lords, p. 257). 

i I omit discussion of the claims about his books, his style, his dis- 
covery of the significance of Dionysus in Greek life and the meaning of 
the tragic — also about himself as a psychologist and the moral quality 
of his thinking. To consider some of them to any purpose would require 
more knowledge than I possess. As to Ecce Homo, the reader will consult 
profitably Raoul Richter's chapter, " Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, ein Dokument 
der Selbsterkenntniss und 8elbstverkenntniss," in his Essays. 

J The present war shows perhaps nothing more clearly than that 
national or racial feelings are now the dominant ones in mankind — a 
human aim does not yet exist (cf., on this point, later, p. 344). 

k A translation of Brandes' early epoch-making essay, " Aristocratic 
Radicalism" (1889), appears with other matter in a volume, Friedrich 
Nietzsche (London and New York, 1914). Karl Joel seems to leave out 
of account these constant ideas or tendencies in speaking of Nietzsche's 
impulse to change in the way he does {op. cit., pp. 169, 320, 329). I may 
add that Lou Andreas-Salome finds as constant his views on (or at least 
his sense of problems as to) the Dionysiac, decadence, the unseasonable 
( Unzeitgemdss ) , and the culture of genius. 

i See letter to Brandes, Brief e, III, 322 ; Werke, 327, § 800. Cf . Ecce 
Homo, II, § 3 ; The Antichristian, § 5. A special monograph, " Pascal 



NOTES 479 

et Nietzsche," by Henry Bauer, with an introduction by Henri Lichten- 
berger, appeared in the Revue Germanique, January, 1914. 



CHAPTER IV 

aCf. Ludwig Stein, Deutsche Rundschau, March, 1893, p. 402; M. A. 
Miigge, Nietzsche, His Life and Works, ix; Nietzsche's Werke (pocket 
ed.), Ill, XIV. 

b So Lou Andreas-Salome, op. cit., p. 8. 

C A11 is contained in Vols. I, IX, X of the 8vo ed. and the greater 
part in Vols. I, II, of the pocket ed. As to the mental history of 
Nietzsche before the date of The Birth of Tragedy, see E. Windrath's 
Friedrich Nietzsches geistige Entwicklung bis zur Entstehung der Oeburt 
der Tragbdie (Beilage zum Jahresbericht, 1912-3, des H. Herz Gymnasium, 
Hamburg, 1913). 

d " Philosophy in the Tragic Period of the Greeks," sect. 3 ; cf . a 
later remark, Dawn of Day, § 244. Nietzsche once puts it strongly, " An 
indiscriminate impulse for knowledge is like an indiscriminate sexual 
impulse — a sign of commonness " ! 

e He uses the terms " Richter," " Gesetzgeber," " Wertmesser " — cf . 
" Schopenhauer as Educator," sects. 3 and 6. Later we shall find him 
conjecturing that the original meaning of " Mensch " was " one who 
measures." 

f " Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 3. Cf. an implied 
definition in Human, All-too-Human, § 436, " one who has chosen for his 
task the most general knowledge and the valuation of existence as a 
whole." Later, when he comes to read existence in terms of change and 
becoming, he defines philosophy as " the most general form of history, as 
an attempt to describe somehow the Heraclitean becoming and to ab- 
breviate it in sign-language, to translate it, as it were, into a sort of 
ostensible being and give it a name" (quoted by Meyer, op. cit., pp. 579, 
580 ) . Nietzsche remarks, " To make philosophy purely a matter of 
science ( like Trendelenburg ) is to throw the musket into the corn-field " 
( Werke, X, 299, § 55 ) . 

e Cf . the manner in which the philosopher, and Heraclitus in par- 
ticular, are spoken of, " Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 8 ; 
note also the tone of Werke, X, 299, § 56. 

h The " horrible ( entsetzliche ) struggle for existence " is often re- 
ferred to; cf. Werke, IX, 146. See Dorner's general representation of 
Nietzsche's view on this point (op. cit., 189-91). 

iCf. Birth of Tragedy, sect. 16 ("eternal life"), sect. 17 ("another 
world"), sect. 21 ("another being"); "Schopenhauer as Educator," 
sect. 5 ( " something beyond our individual existence " ) . I have elaborated 
this view and some of its consequences in an article, " An Introductory 
Word on Nietzsche," Harvard Theological Review, October, 1913. 

J He dissents from the view of Socrates and the rationalism that 
followed in his wake, proceeding as it did on the theory that man can not 
only know, but can correct existence [Birth of Tragedy, sect. 15; cf. the 
interpretation of Hamlet's inability to act, sect. 7) ; he also remarks on 
the unfortunate consequences in modern times of the idea that all may be 
happy on the earth (sect. 18), and says in speaking of the effort to help 
out nature and correct the rule of folly and mischance, " It is, to be sure, 
a striving that leads to deep and heartfelt resignation, for what and 
how much can be bettered, whether in particular or in general! " (" Scho- 
penhauer as Educator," sect. 3 ) . 

k Cf. a memorandum, " When Friedrich August Wolf asserted the 



480 NOTES 

necessity of slavery in the interests of a culture, it was one of the strong 
thoughts of my great predecessor, which others are too feeble to lay hold 
of" (Werke, IX, 268, §216). 

i That genuine art does not spring from instincts for luxury, and 
that a new birth of it in the modern world is to be expected rather from 
a society freed from luxury, is asserted in Werke, X, 459, § 367 (here 
Nietzsche refers to the idea of the curse of gold which underlies Wagner's 
"Ring of the Nibelungen ") . Art undergoes degeneration when it is a 
means of diversion simply {Birth of Tragedy, sects. 22, 24). Nietzsche 
draws a satirical picture of the modern arts and of the society that calls 
for them, in " Richard Wagner at Bayreuth," sect. 8. All the same he 
admits that art is not for the time of actual struggle (ibid., sect. 4). 

mC. W. Super, International Journal of Ethics, January, 1913, p. 178. 

n This in lectures at Basel, as reported by Malwida von Meysenbug, 
Der Lebensabend einer Idealisten, p. 50. 

°A later observation of Nietzsche's is of interest in this connection: 
" Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs ; he alone suffers 
so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The most unhappy and melan- 
choly animal is, as is reasonable, the cheerfullest " (Will to Power, §91). 
Nietzsche thinks that the current impression of Greek cheerfulness comes 
largely by way of Christianity, which encountered a decadent Greece and 
was offended by its lightness and superficiality. This kind of " cheer- 
fulness," however, was a poor counterpart to the high serenity of men 
like ^Eschylus, and the determining influence in it was the masses, or 
old-time slaves, who wished for little else than enjoyment and felt no 
responsibilities, being without either great memories or great hopes 
(Birth of Tragedy, sect. 11). The great epoch of Greece to Nietzsche's 
mind was from Hesiod to ^Eschylus (see Joel's discussion of the subject 
in op. cit., pp. 297-315). In English the general view of Nietzsche and 
Burckhardt finds expression in W. L. Courtney's The Idea of Tragedy 
(1900). There are echoes of Burckhardt's view in W. G. Sumner's Folk- 
ways, pp. 104-5. 

p Nietzsche remarks on the contrast between a chorus of Apollo, in 
which the maidens preserve their separate identity and keep their civil 
names, and a dithyrambic chorus of Dionysus, in which each one's civic 
connection and social position are entirely forgotten (Birth of Tragedy, 
sect. 8). 

<i See the wonderful description, half picture and half interpretation, 
of the Dionysus festival (Birth of Tragedy, close of sect. 1); cf. Erwin 
Rohde's Psyche, II, 17 n. 

r Cf ., in this connection, Walter Pater, Greek Studies, pp. 41-3, 36; 
Erwin Rohde, op. cit., II, 116 n.; Encyclopedia Britannica^ 9th ed., art. 
"Dionysus"; J. A. Symonds, The Greek Poets, II, 145-G. 

3 Rites and ceremonies which we should regard as coming under the 
head of sexual excesses seem to have characterized the beginnings of the 
Dionysus worship in Greece, as they did the celebrations in oriental 
countries from which the worship originally came; but in time the Greek 
worship became a more chastened thing. 

t Birth of Tragedy, beginning of sect. 17. Nietzsche thinks that this 
Dionysiac experience has been widespread in the world (though of course 
under other names ) , that in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing 
crowds ever increasing in number were borne from place to place under 
the same impulse (the St. John's and St. Vitus' dancers being kindred 
to the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks ) , that the phenomena can be traced 
back as far as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea — and he adds, with 
reference to those who dismiss them as " folk-diseases " with a smile of 
contempt or pity prompted by a consciousness of their own superior 
health, that they do not surmise what a cadaverous and ghostly aspect 



NOTES 481 

their very " health " presents, when the glowing light of the Dionysian 
revelers rushes past them (ibid., sect. 1). 

u Nietzsche even says that from the nature of art as ordinarily con- 
ceived (Apollinic art), tragic art cannot be honestly derived, the pleasure 
connected with the latter being pleasure in the annihilation of beautiful 
forms, even the fairest, while Apollinic art strives (by its appropriate 
means, picture and story) to eternalize them. Tragedy and music alike 
are born of another realm. See The Birth of Tragedy, sects. 16 and 25. 
Meyer remarks that it is doubtful whether Dionysus can be described as 
a "Kunstgott": "he became that first for Nietzsche" (op. cit., p. 248). 

v Nietzsche draws attention to Euripides' description in the " Bacchse " 
of Archilochus (the first lyric, as contrasted to epic, poet among the 
Greeks), who, a drunken reveler, sinks down and falls asleep on the 
high mountains under the midday sun, when the dream-god comes to 
him and touches him with the laurel — as if to show that the lyric (i.e., 
essentially Dionysiac) outpourings of love and hate, though so different 
from the calm and measured movements of epic art, may yet win 
Apollinic consecration (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 5). 

w This particularly holds of the first great tragic dramatist, 
iEschylus. As to the ancient view of iEschylus as Dionysus-inspired 
(the view, e.g., of Pausanias, Athenaeus, and Quintilian), see Symonds, 
op. cit., I, 373-4. Plato regarded poetic inspiration as akin to madness 
( " Phaedrus " ) ; "all good poets compose their beautiful poems not as 
works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed" ("Ion"), 
the analogy in " Ion " being the behavior of Bacchantes under the influence 
of Dionysus. Symonds cites the phrase " con furie," with which Italians 
sometimes describe the manner of production of a Tintoretto or a Michael 
Angelo (op. cit., II, 394-5). 

x Nietzsche remarks on the different type of language used by the 
characters in the dialogue from that of the chorus — it is clear, firm, 
almost like that of Homer, i.e., Apollinic, not turgid, glowing, Dionysiac 
(Birth of Tragedy, end of sect. 8). Symonds appears to note the same 
contrast (without giving it this interpretation), in saying, "When the 
Athenians developed tragedy, they wrote their iambics in pure Attic, but 
they preserved a Dorian tone in their choruses" (op. cit., I, 305). 



CHAPTER V 

a "Matter itself is only given as sensation" (Werke, 1st ed., X, 429) ; 
this after saying that the development of matter into a thinking subject 
is " impossible." Cf. the comment on Democritus' " enormous petitio 
principii" (ibid., X, 114). I cannot locate these passages in the second 
edition of the Werke, from which I ordinarily quote. 

t> It is not contradictory to this when Nietzsche speaks, as he some- 
times does, of picturing (vorstellen) as an action of the brain — this is 
merely a part of the ordinary empirical view of things; cf. the guarded 
language as to Anaxagoras, in " Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," 
sect. 15, and also the express statement, " The sensation is not the result 
of the cell, but the cell is the result of the sensation, i.e., an artistic 
projection, an image" (Werke, IX, 194). 

c I have indicated some of the main points of Schopenhauer's meta- 
physics in the following articles: "Schopenhauer's Type of Idealism" 
(The Monist, January, 1911), " Schopenhauer's Contact with Pragmatism" 
(Philosophical Revieiv, March, 1910), "Schopenhauer's Contact with 
Theology" (Harvard Theological Review, July, 1911). 

d Nietzsche speaks of the " Ur-Einen " repeatedly in The Birth of 
Tragedy; the subjectivity of time and space, hence of succession and 



482 NOTES 

number, is also asserted in " On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral 
Sense" (Werke, X, 201-2). 

e The feeling comes to expression repeatedly in The Birth of Tragedy; 
also in " Schopenhauer as Educator," and " Richard Wagner in Bayreuth." 

f This view makes the background of The Birth of Tragedy (see par- 
ticularly sects. 4 and 5). Cf. also Werke, IX, 192-4; XII, 169, §349; 
and the " Attempt at Self-criticism," prefixed to the later edition of The 
Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche appears to think that the World-Will projects 
space and time with the picture, so that these forms are not, strictly 
speaking, merely our own (cf. an express remark, Werke, IX, 107, §64). 
As stated in the quotation made in the text, we may divine our real nature 
as projections of the World-Will, figures in his dream, but it is no more 
necessary that we should do so, than that the painted warriors on a 
canvas should be conscious of the battle in which they there take part 
(Birth of Tragedy, end of sect. 5). It appears that Nietzsche had specu- 
lative moods even as a boy. "At the age of twelve, I thought out for 
myself a wonderful Trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and 
God the Devil. My reasoning was that God, thinking of himself, created the 
second person of the God-head; but that, in order to be able to think of 
himself, he had to think of his antithesis, and so create him. — In this 
way, I began philosophizing" (Werke, XIV, 347, §201). 

e Since though the world is a picture, not a reality, and has only an 
illusory being (Schein), like figures in a dream, it springs from the 
deepest need of its Creator as a suffering being, Nietzsche finds the will 
to illusion deeper, "more metaphysical," than the will to truth; it is, 
indeed, just the truth or reality (i.e., itself) that the World-Will wants 
to get away from (and does get away from in turning itself into a picture 
to contemplate). And it is the same desire for an illusory picture-world 
that gives birth, he holds, to art in man (see the "Preface to Richard 
Wagner " prefixed to The Birth of Tragedy, where art is called the " true 
metaphysical activity of life"). The will to truth comes thus to be in 
a way anti-natural : " to will to know, when it is just illusion that is 
the redemptive thing (die Erlbsung) — what an inversion"! See Werke, 
XIV, 366, § 236; 369, §240 (these being later comments on The Birth 
of Tragedy). Not only is it naive to think that we can get out of the 
world of illusion, but, if it were possible, the escape would be undesirable: 
life in illusion is the goal. Nietzsche accordingly calls his philosophy 
an inverted Platonism — the further we get from real being, the better, 
fairer, purer (Werke, IX, 109, § 168; X, 160, § 126; IX, 190, § 133). 

h Cf. the striking language of C. J. Keyser, " Not in the ground of 
need, not in bent and painful toil, but in the deep-centered play-instinct 
of the world, in the joyous mood of the eternal Being, which is always 
young, science has her origin and root " ( " Mathematics," a pamphlet ) . 
The peculiarity of Nietzsche's view is that he assigns a motive to the 
play, viz., dissatisfaction and pain. The idea of the world as a dream 
or play or game, and of ourselves as figures or players in it (cf. Werke, 
XIII, 207, §471; 282, §685) appears also in J. H. Newman's Parochial 
and Plain Sermons, Vol. IV, p. 221. Newman, however, distinguished 
" our real eternal existence " from this temporal form, while to Nietzsche, 
as to Schopenhauer, " real eternal existence " belongs to the " World- 
Will " alone. 

i I confess that I can make no sense out of such a view. The thought 
of pain is of course different from pain itself (as different as any 
thought is from an experience), but that pain may be in itself something 
different from what we feel is to me a proposition without meaning — 
pain is feeling and nothing else (which is not saying that it may not 
have physiological or other conditions, which are not pain ) . Cf . William 
James, " No one pretends that pain as such only appears like pain, but 



NOTES 483 

in itself is different, for to be as a mental experience is only to appear 
to some one" (A Pluralistic Universe, p. 198; as to feeling in general, 
see his Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 151). One may question whether 
Nietzsche's view was not a logical inference rather than a direct ob- 
servation. 

i The fragment appears in Nietzsche's Brief e, I, 343 ff. Cf . the letters 
to von Gersdorff (1866), ibid., p. 49; to Paul Deussen, ibid., p. 101; and 
Richter's general account of the matter, op. cit., pp. 152-3; also Richter's 
reference to the subject in his Der Skepticismus in der Philosophic, II, 
463-4. 

k Friedrich Rittelmeyer thinks that Nietzsche continued to hold to 
the main points of the Schopenhauerian metaphysics for five years after 
the " Critique of the Schopenhauerian Philosophy," his criticism being 
directed only to details (Friedrich Nietzsche und das Erkenntnissproblem, 
pp. 7, 8). 

i It is difficult here to get the right word. Nietzsche repeats Schopen- 
hauer's views as to the inapplicability of the category of " causality " in 
this connection (Werke, X, 193), and yet his constant underlying presup- 
position is that there are things outside ourselves, which in some way 
affect us. We receive (empfangen) the stimuli (Reize) — this is the way 
in which he always speaks. 

m Cf . Helmholtz, " So far as the characteristic quality of our sensation 
informs of the peculiar nature of the outer influence that excites it, it 
may pass as a sign of it, but not as a copy. ... A sign need have no 
sort of resemblance to that of which it is the sign. The relation between 
the two consists simply in the fact that the same object under the same 
conditions elicits the same sign" (Physiologische Optik, §26). 

n F. H. Bradley, in his Principles of Logic, protested against the re- 
duction of the universe to an " unearthly ballet of bloodless categories," 
and Schopenhauer still earlier had referred to Hegel's " Ballet der Selbst- 
bewegung der Begriffe" (Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient 
Reason, § 34 ) . 

Nietzsche had perhaps noted Schiller's line, " Wage du zu irren und 
zu traumen," which Lange quotes (Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 513). 
Schiller had also said, 

" Nur der Irrthum ist das Leben 
Und das Wissen ist der Tod." 

p If the ordinary person replies to Bishop Berkeley's arguments about 
matter, " It is no matter what Bishop Berkeley says," he is quite right : 
it is no matter — to him, and he probably does better to keep to his 
instinctive views. 

<i Cf. a passage in William James's Principles of Psychology, I, 288-9, 
ending, " Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone ! Other 
minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! 
My world is but one of a million alike imbedded, alike real to those who 
may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the mind of 
eel, cuttle-fish, or crab! " 

CHAPTER VI 

a Cf . "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 1, as to what education may do: 
while it cannot change the " wahre Ursinn und Grundstoff " of our being, 
it may free it of weeds, rubbish, and vermin, bring it light and air and 
rain, and so complete the work of stepmotherly nature. 

b Cf. the statement of his four rules of controversial warfare in Ecce 
Homo, I, § 7. The passage, though written much later, throws such an 
important light on his general psychology and history that I quote it in 
full : " War is another matter. I am warlike in my way. To attack is 



*m 



484 NOTES 

one of my instincts. Ability to be hostile, hostility — this perhaps presup- 
poses a strong nature, in any case it is conditioned in the make-up of 
every strong nature. Such a nature needs oppositions, consequently it 
seeks opposition: aggressive pathos belongs as necessarily to strength as 
revengefulness and rancor (Rach- und Nachgefiihl) to weakness. Woman 
for example, is revengeful: it goes with her weakness, as does also her 
sensibility to others' needs. — The strength of the aggressor has a kind of 
measure in the opposition he needs: all growth shows itself in the 
seeking out of a powerful opponent — or problem; for a philosopher, who 
is warlike, challenges also problems to a duel. The task is to overcome, 
not oppositions in general, but those which require the enlistment of all 
one's force, suppleness, and mastery in arms — equal opponents. Equality 
with the enemy — first presupposition of an honest duel. Where one 
despises, one can not wage war; where one commands, where one sees 
something beneath one, one has no war to wage. — My war-practice may 
be summed up in four propositions. First, I attack only those things that 
are victorious — on occasion I wait till they are victorious. Second, I attack 
only things against which I should find no allies, where I stand alone — 
where I compromise myself alone. ... I have never taken a step pub- 
licly, which did not compromise me: that is my criterion of right acting. 
Third, I never attack persons, — I use the person only as a strong 
magnifying-glass, by which to make a general, but elusive and impalpable 
evil visible. So I attacked David Strauss, more exactly the success of an 
old man's weak book in the circles of German ' culture ' — I thereby caught 
this culture in the act. . . . So I attacked Wagner, more exactly the 
falseness, the mongrel instincts (die Instinkt-Ealbschlachtigkeit) of our 
culture which confuses the super-refined with the opulent, the latest with 
the great. Fourth, I attack only things where every personal difference is 
excluded, where there is no background of sorry experiences. On the con- 
trary, attacking is with me a proof of good will, and, on occasion, of grati- 
tude. I honor, I distinguish, when I connect my name with that of a cause, 
a person: for or against — it is all the same. When I make war on Chris- 
tianity, this is allowable, because I have had nothing unfortunate and 
obstructive from that quarter — the most earnest Christians have ever 
been kindly disposed to me. I myself, an opponent of Christianity de 
rigueur, am far from charging to the individual what is the fatal result 
of past ages." 

c It must be admitted that later on — in his second period — Nietzsche 
does occasionally use " Selbstsucht " in a eulogistic sense. His attitude 
then becomes one of sweeping criticism toward his early views, and 
particularly toward whatever could be regarded as high-flown and extrava- 
gant, — and he puts a certain selfishness at the root of all actions. All the 
same, he admits that there are different kinds and grades of it, and in 
connection with Siegfried speaks of " der hochsten Selbstsucht" (using 
" Selbstigkeit " a few lines further on — see Joyful Science, §99). On the 
other hand, even " Selbstisch " is used with an unfavorable shade of 
meaning in Mixed Opinions etc., § 91. 



CHAPTER VII 

a What would be possible if all men's needs were met by the direct 
bounty of nature (as is sometimes supposed to be the case in tropical 
regions ) , or if machinery could take the place of labor, is another ques- 
tion. Nietzsche recognizes the higher uses of machinery, and in general 
takes a somewhat broader view of the subject later on (see pp. 133, 440). 

t> See J. E. Cabot's A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 450. No 



NOTES 485 

doubt other motives co-operated in leading Emerson to make the experi- 
ment, but I think that the one mentioned in the text was the underlying 
one. 

CHAPTER VIII 

a The connection which music may have with a man's deeper mood 
and attitude to life as a whole is shown in an avowal made by Schumann 
to Mendelssohn after hearing the latter play one of Bach's chorals: " Were 
life deprived of all trust, of all faith, this simple choral would restore all 
to me." 

b Whether Wagner really held to the full Nietzschean ( Schopen- 
hauerian) view of the relation of words to music is open to question, but 
Nietzsche thought so at this time. Cf. The Birth of Tragedy, sect. 16; 
"Richard Wagner etc.," sects. 5, 8, 9; Genealogy of Morals, III, §5. 

c All this is important to bear in mind in connection with Nietzsche's 
later criticism of Wagner (particularly in "The Case of Wagner"), of 
which, for reasons of space, I shall not be able to give any detailed 
account. 

d He wrote to Erwin Rohde, January 28, 1872, " I have closed an 
alliance with Wagner. You can have no idea how near we are now to one 
another, and how our plans fit together" {Brief e, II, 285). 

e A " Gulturgeschichte des griechischen Volkes," in which all his phil- 
ological studies were to culminate. He returned to the idea in 1875, plan- 
ning systematic courses of lectures to cover seven years. See Richter, op. 
cit., p. 57. 

f Ziegler says that Nietzsche was ready to give up his professorship for 
this purpose {op. cit., p. 65; cf. Drews, op. cit., p. 159; Richter, op. cit., 
p. 58 n. ) , and Drews adds that he had some idea of founding a new kind 
of educational institution {op. cit., pp. 45-6). We find him speaking in 
" We Philologists " of establishing a great center for the production of 
better men as the task of the future, and of educating the educators for 
such work — although the first ones must educate themselves, and it was 
for these he wrote {Werke, X, 415-9). Cf. Ernst Weber, Die padagogishen 
Gedanken des jungen Nietzsche, im Zusammenhang mit seiner Welt- und 
Lebens-Anschauung. 

s The offense given to purely philological circles by The Birth of 
Tragedy found marked expression in Wilamowitz-Mollendorf's Zukunfts- 
philologie, Eine Erwiderung auf Friedrich Nietzsches Geburt der Tragodie. 
To this Erwin Rohde replied with another brochure, Afterphilologie, 
Sendschreiben eines Philologen an Richard Wagner — Wagner having come 
to the defense of Nietzsche in a public letter. See the summary of the 
controversy in Richter, op. cit., pp. 43-4. 

h This, however, was not printed at the time, being regarded by 
Wagner circles as not sufficiently diplomatic (see Brief e, Ha, 217 ff., 
where it is given, and Richter, op. cit., p. 43). 

i Nietzsche had complained, Easter, 1873, that the Germans were not 
subscribing to the Bayreuth project, and to the question Why? he an- 
swered that the educated Philistine {Bildungs-Philister) had become con- 
tented, and had lost the sense for what was great. Strauss was a typical 
representative of the new state of mind, and this was the principal reason 
for the attack on him. See Werke (pocket ed.), II, xxxii-iii. 

i Paul Elmer More disposes of the break — " quarrel," as he terms it — 
very simply: it was at bottom due to " the clashing of two insanely jealous 
egotisms" {Nietzsche, p. 75). 

k It is possible, even probable, that Nietzsche was unjust to Wagner 
in this interpretation; see Richter's admirable account of the whole 
matter, op. cit., p. 52 ff.; also Drews' discriminations, op. cit., p. 188 ff. 



486 NOTES 

i As to the real Wagner, see Henri Lichtenberger's two books, Wagner 
(in the series, " Les Maitres de la Musique"), and Richard Wagner, Poete 
et Penseur. Kare sympathy and understanding for both Nietzsche and 
Wagner mark this author's writings. See also Edouard Schure's article in 
the Revue des deux mondes, August 15, 1895. 

mln a late letter to Strindberg he even speaks — confusedly, we must 
think — of illness as leading to a cessation of the relations with Wagner 
(see North American Review, August, 1913, p. 195). 

CHAPTER IX 

a See the warning addressed to young readers, Werke (pocket ed.), 
Ill, 442, § 19. 

t> Cf . Mixed Opinions etc., §211; also Lou Andreas-Salome's remarks 
on the general character of this period, op. cit., p. 90. 

c August HornefFer {Nietzsche als Moralist und Schriftsteller, p. 22) 
thinks that moral criticism {moralische Bedenken) was really Nietzsche's 
starting point, citing Nietzsche's own language in the preface, § 3, to 
Genealogy of Morals, but that he did not venture to follow the impulse 
at first, owing to aversion to the subject in the circles about him and the 
indifference of the general public to the older moralists of that type — a 
contributory factor being that his own thoughts were not ripe and had 
no definite direction. Accordingly, when later, i.e., with the period we 
are now considering, he appeared as a moralist, all the world was sur- 
prised and disgusted. 

d He echoes Goethe's estimate of reason and science as the highest 
capacity of man {Human, etc., §265). Nothing is more urgent than 
knowing, and keeping oneself continuously in condition to do so thor- 
oughly {ibid., § 288). See in particular the remarks on the scientific man 
of the type of Aristotle {ibid., § 264). 

e This perhaps not entirely from lack of will. Later on, as we shall 
see, he planned an extensive course of study in the natural sciences, and he 
now remarks that every one ought to master at least one science thor- 
oughly, so as to know what scientific method means and how necessary is 
the utmost circumspection — recommending this especially to women 
{Human, etc., 635). Perhaps an exception should be made to the language 
of the text, so far as Nietzsche had specialized in Greek philology. Had 
he remained faithful to this specialty and not been drawn into the general 
field of philosophy and ethics, he might have produced something of the 
first rank in it. Richter says, " I am convinced that had Nietzsche held 
on to philology and his professional work, he might have become an his- 
torian of Greek culture in great style and of great authority" {op. cit., 
p. 58). 

f Cf . Nietzsche's own language on the hesitating, intermediate char- 
acter of this period, Dawn of Day, § 30. 

s Nietzsche, however, speaks of the friendly extravagance of the in- 
scription (letter to Rohde, Brief e, II, 549). 

k Nietzsche writes to Rohde in the above-mentioned letter (of June, 
1878) : "By the way, always seek out myself in my book [Human, All- 
too-Human\ and not friend Ree. I am proud to have discovered his 
splendid qualities and intentions, but he has not had the slightest influ- 
ence on the conception of my * philosophia in nuce' : this was finished 
and in good part committed to paper, when I made his nearer acquaint- 
ance in the autumn of 1876 " [perhaps the word " conception " is sig- 
nificant, the statement not being really inconsistent with indebtedness to 
Ree for help in detail]. An account of the intellectual relations of 
Nietzsche to Ree is given in the preface ( § 4 ; cf . § 7 ) to Genealogy of 



NOTES 487 

Morals. Wagner did not like Ree, who was a Jew, and warned Nietzsche 
in Sorrento against him ( see Drews, op. tit., p. 221 ) . Richter has an 
extended discriminating note on the relations between Nietzsche and Ree 
(op. tit., pp. 163-4). 

i Ziegler appears to me to exaggerate when he speaks of a " ganz 
fundamentals Wandlung " {op. tit., p. 76); he says later himself that 
the change was " angebahnt." Riehl speaks simply of a " grosse 
Loslbsung" (op. tit., p. 59). There can be no doubt that the change 
appeared great, even to those who knew Nietzsche well (cf. what Rohde 
wrote, as quoted in Bernoulli's Franz Overbeck und Nietzsche, I, 261 ) . 



CHAPTER X 

a Cf . a striking passage quoted by Riehl (op. tit., p. 68) which I 
cannot locate : " How strong the metaphysical need is . . . may be gath- 
ered from the fact that even when a free man has got rid of all meta- 
physical belief, art in its highest manifestations easily causes a rever- 
beration (Miterklingen) of the long silent or even broken metaphysical 
strings. If one becomes conscious of this, one feels a deep twinge of 
the heart and longs for a return of the object he has lost, whether it 
be called religion or metaphysics. In such moments a man's intellectual 
character is put to the proof." 

b Cf . Dawn of Day, § 540, where he even calls it a piece of pedantry 
to distinguish between learning by study and natural endowment, though 
he admits that Michael Angelo distinguished in this way (in contrasting 
Raphael with himself), and that learning is not altogether a matter of 
will: one must be able to learn. 

c In Mixed Opinions etc., § 213, however, Nietzsche gives precedence in 
education to drawing and painting over music; and in The Wanderer etc., 
§ 167, he has other depreciatory references to music, even saying that 
the Greeks gave it a secondary place — that is, aside from the Pytha- 
goreans, who invented the five-year silence and did not invent dialectics — 
something for which he now has more respect than in his first period. 
This view of the Greeks, if at all reconcilable with his earlier view, is 
only so if he has the later (decadent) Greeks in mind, or at least the 
Greeks, so far as they loved discussion and strife. 

d Cf . Human, etc., § 292, " No honey is sweeter than that of knowl- 
edge"; this aphorism closes with the ejaculation, "Toward the light — 
thy last movement; an exultant cry of knowing — thy last sound." On 
the other hand, Nietzsche is not unaware of the losses or dangers to 
which men of science are subject — on the side of active will they are 
apt to be weakened, and they may lose their highest power and bloom 
earlier than the poetic natures [Mixed Opinions etc., §206). 

e Cf . another description of one who has a " free " mind about life 
(Human, etc., §287): though at first he loves and hates, and forgets 
nothing, he comes in time neither to hate existence nor to love it, but 
to lie above it, now with the eye of joy, now with that of sorrow, like 
nature herself with her alternating summer and autumn moods. 

f Cf . the picture of the " Don Juan of Knowledge," Dawn of Day, 
§ 327 : the objects he gains fail to hold his love, but he enjoys the adven- 
ture, the pursuit, and the intrigues; he pursues the highest and remotest 
stars of knowledge, till at last there is nothing more to seek, unless it 
be the abode of pain, and perhaps even that will disappoint him like 
everything else. Even during Nietzsche's student days at Bonn, he had 
written his sister (June 11, 1865), "Do we then in our study seek rest, 
peace, happiness? No, only truth, and even if it were in the highest 
degree horrible and ugly" (Brief e, V, 113). 



488 NOTES 

g Cf . the striking description of the manner of life of one who devotes 
himself to knowledge, Human, etc., § 291. Nietzsche thinks it new in 
history to make knowledge something more than a means — even among 
the Greeks it was a means to virtue, as among Christians a means to 
the soul's salvation (Joyful Science, §123). 

h Cf . Mixed Opinions etc., § 369 : " There is a weariness of the finest 
and more cultivated minds, for whom the best that earth offers has 
become empty." See also, in the course of study of the psychology of the 
Apostle Paul, the appreciation of the religious idealism of ancient Israel, 
Dawn of Day, § 68. As to the lack of intellectual warrant, however, for 
the positions of religion, see Human, etc., §§110, 111, and the extreme 
statements of Dawn of Day, §§ 95, 464. 

1 Nietzsche is sometimes scarcely just either to religion or to meta- 
physics, showing, for instance, a strange lack of comprehension (strange 
particularly for one who knew Schopenhauer) of the Christian " Seelen- 
noth," which sighs over inner corruption and craves salvation (Human, 
etc., § 27 ; Dawn of Day, § 57 ) ; he even speaks of the flattening and 
externalizing of the religious life which followed in the wake of the 
Renaissance as something to be looked upon with joy (Human, etc., 
§ 237 ) . However, in another passage, " In honor of the homines religiosi " 
(Joyful Science, §350), he virtually qualifies the last-named judgment, 
saying that the struggle against the church was partly the struggle of 
the commoner, more self-satisfied, and superficial natures against the 
graver and deeper ones. 

3 See a wonderful passage continuing this line of thought (Joyful 
Science, § 277 ) , and concluding, " In fact something plays with us now 
and then — dear accident: it takes us on occasion by the hand, and the 
wisest Providence could conceive no more beautiful music than our foolish 
hand succeeds in making." 

k A legitimate use of the term " soul " is as covering those inner 
motions which come easy to one and hence are accomplished gladly and 
with grace; a man passes as soulless when these motions come hard and 
with effort (Dawn of Day, §311). On the "soul" as an inner quantity 
in general, see Genealogy etc., II, § 16. 

i Compare a similar view, worked out with convincing thoroughness, 
by the late Edmund Montgomery in his Philosophical Problems in the 
Light of Vital Organization^ Nietzsche has interesting comments on 
dreams as interpretations of bodily, particularly nervous states (Human, 
etc., §13; Dawn of Day, §119; Will to Power, §479); if the dreams 
change, the conditions being the same, it is because varying impulses are 
in turn dominant in us (Joyful Science, §119). Will, in the conscious 
sense, is, equally with consciousness in general, a secondary phenomenon 
(Dawn of Day, § 124). At the same time he seems to regard something 
akin to thought as belonging to the very nature of man, making the 
singular statement, " Man, like every living creature, thinks continually, 
but does not know it" (Meyer, op. cit., p. 359, quotes this from Joyful 
Science, but I cannot place it; cf. note gg, p. 500 of this volume). 

m The contrasted requisites for describing and explaining are men- 
tioned in Dawn of Day, § 428. Apparently Nietzsche held to the a priori 
nature of the causal idea — at least Joyful Science, § 98, looks that way. 

n It must be admitted that an express and clear reconciling state- 
ment (such as one finds, for example, in Montgomery's book just alluded 
to) Nietzsche does not make. 

CHAPTER XI 

a Nietzsche also differs from Kant and Schopenhauer in that while 
they accept the feeling of responsibility at its face value, and argue 



NOTES 489 

unhesitatingly from it as a premise to free will as a conclusion, he sub- 
jects the feeling to critical scrutiny. See particularly Human, etc., § 39, 
and Richter's comments (op. cit., p. 177). 

b Cf., for example, chap, ix of J. Cotter Morison's Service of Man. 
Nietzsche's attitude is also much like Spinoza's; cf. Genealogy of Morals, 
II, § 15, and Richter, op. cit., pp. 347-8. 

c How impulses of praise and blame arise is interestingly, if one- 
sidedly, set forth in Daivn of Day, § 140. 

dCf. Genealogy of Morals, III, §16; Twilight of the Idols, I, §10; 
Will to Power, §§233, 235. Emerson's remark may be quoted, "The less 
we have to do with our sins the better. No man can afford to waste his 
moments in compunctions " ( " Swedenborg " in Representative Men ) . 

e This is a later statement (Zarathustra, II, xx), but in harmony 
with the view now. The analysis made of revenge there is interesting: 
we are impotent to change the injury since it belongs to the past, and 
yet we wish to assert our power and get even with it, and so we inflict 
pain, i.e., do a senseless thing rather than nothing. 

fCf. a later reference to Plato's "Timaeus" (Werke, XIV, 318, 
§154): "very interesting is Plato's 'Timaeus,' p. 86: mental illness 
occasioned by a defective state of the body; the task of educators and 
states is to heal at this point. If the cure is not accomplished in time, 
educators and states, not the sick, to be held responsible." 

g Cf ., on this general subject, Dietrich H. Kerler's Nietzsche und die 
Vergeltungsidee (zur Strafrechtsreform). 

h Richter (op. cit., p. 177) notes that these motives are now treated 
as interchangeable by Nietzsche, though they are so different. Pleasure 
(in the broad elastic sense) is undoubtedly the more fundamental one, 
and Nietzsche himself gives preservation a secondary place later on. 

i Nietzsche goes far in his exaltation of reason at this time, as con- 
trasted with the relative depreciation of it earlier. He even asks whether 
it is not the head that binds men together (for advantage), and the 
heart (blind gropings of love and hate) that sunders them (Mixed 
Opinions etc., §197; cf. The Wanderer etc., §41). " Besonnenheit " is 
called the virtue of virtues (The Wanderer etc., §294; cf. §189). He 
questions whether feelings are the original element in us, suggesting that 
judgments often lie behind them, though this may be forgotten and the 
feelings pass on as instinctive inheritances; so temperament in many 
men may owe its origin to good or bad intellectual habits — if not in 
themselves, then in their ancestors (Dawn of Day, §§247, 35). Once 
he admits, however, that aversion may be more ultimate than the reasons. 
given for it (ibid., §358). See on the subject, Riehl, op. cit., p. 65; 
Richter, op. cit., p. 178. 

J Occasionally (e.g., Human, etc., §49) Nietzsche refers to " unego- 
istic " impulses, and this leads Ziegler (op. cit., p. 86) to the view that 
he recognized a double source of human action ; but in such cases, I take 
it, he simply relapses into ordinary methods of speech. In Human, etc.,, 
§ 48, after using the term " unegoistic," he says that the word is never 
to be understood strictly, but simply as a convenient form of expression 
( eine Erleichterung des Ausdrucks ) . 

k Nietzsche gives still other statements of the stages through which 
morality passes. For example, according to The Wanderer etc., § 44,, 
morality was at first and at bottom a means of preserving the com- 
munity or of keeping it on a certain level, the motives appealed to being 
fear and hope — with perhaps the added fear of an hereafter and a hell; 
later, it becomes the command of a God (cf. the "Mosaic law"), and 
later still an absolute law; at length a morality of inclination, of taste 
arrives — and finally one of insight, which transcends the whole circle of 
illusionary motives, yet is aware that for ages mankind could have had 



490 NOTES 

no others. See further statements in Human, etc., § 94 ; The Wanderer etc., 
§ 64, and Beyond Good and Evil, § 32. 

lAt this time Nietzsche assigns to forgetfulness a great role in the 
development or transformation of moral conceptions. See as to justice, 
Human, etc., § 92, and even as to intellectual scrupulousness, Mixed 
Opinions etc., § 26, and generally, The Wanderer etc., § 206. 

m Cf ., as to motives in returning kindnesses, The Wanderer etc., § 256 ; 
in beneficence, ibid., §253; Beyond Good and Evil, § 194; and the general 
irony of Dawn of Day, §§ 385, 523; Joyful Science, § 88. Nietzsche ques- 
tions, however, whether vanity should be condemned to the extent that it 
ordinarily is {The Wanderer etc., §§60, 181) — see the fine analysis, with 
reasons why vanity should be tenderly treated, in Zarathustra, II, xxi; 
still he has no real love for it (Joyful Science, §§87, 263, 283). In- 
stances of his irony toward moral airs and pretensions may be found 
in Joyful Science, §§27, 88, 214; Dawn of Day, §§310, 419— see The 
Wanderer etc., §§14, 304, as to man's taking himself as the end of 
existence. 

In criticism of this kind, no doubt the French moralists such as 
Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues, 
and Chamfort served more or less as models. He says that their 
writings have more real thought in them than all the books of German 
philosophers put together — that they continue the spirit of the Renais- 
sance and of the Greco-Roman world {The Wanderer etc., §214). He 
even has words of recognition for Helvetius (ibid., §216), though later 
on he reflects on him, together with Bentham (Beyond Good and Evil, 
§ 228 ) . He does not pass over Rousseau and notes his influence on 
Kant — Rousseau was in part the author of the moral revival which 
spread over Europe at the end of the eighteenth century; the revival, 
however, contributed little to the understanding of moral phenomena, 
and had rather, from this point of view, an injurious and retrogressive 
influence (The Wanderer etc., §216). 

» Cf. Dawn of Day, § 516, and Zarathustra's sayings, " Physician, 
help thyself: so dost thou help thy patient too" (Zarathustra, I, xxii, 
§ 2 ) ; "If thou hast a suffering friend, be a resting-place to his suffering, 
but, as it were, a hard bed, a camp bed ; so shalt thou serve him best " 
(ibid., II, iii). 

CHAPTER XII 

a Simmel (op. cit., chap, i) finds a fundamental difference between 
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in their respective attitudes to evolution 
as a process in time; see also Meyer's comments (op. cit., p. 275), and 
Nietzsche's own reference to Schopenhauer in Beyond Good and Evil, 
§204. 

t> Schopenhauer, it may be observed, never radically changed in his 
philosophical views, knew no evolution — once precipitated (and at a 
comparatively early time in his life), the views remained fixed. 

c We scarcely think of the " blessing of labor " just where it would 
be an unquestionable blessing, namely for one who, having inherited a 
competence, is without sufficient intellect to know how to use the leisure 
it gives (Joyful Science, §359). The principal benefit of labor is in 
keeping common natures and officials, business people, soldiers, and 
the like, from being idle, just as it is the principal objection to socialism 
that it wants to create idleness for common natures — for the idle common 
individual becomes a burden to himself and to the world (Werke, XI, 
367, §555). 

d Nietzsche's picture of the " great men of industry " may seem 
overdrawn and probably was not based on much personal observation, 



NOTES 491 

but Charles Francis Adams remarks in his recently published auto- 
biography (Charles Francis Adams, 1835-1915: An autobiography, p. 196) : 
" I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many ' successful ' men — 
' big ' financially — men famous during the last half century ; and a less 
interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever 
known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor 
is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought, 
or refinement. A set of mere money-makers and traders, they were 
essentially unattractive and uninteresting." 

e Nietzsche's earliest reference ( i.e., in his first, semi-metaphysical 
period) to the doctrines of the French Revolution was uncomplimentary — 
they were an un-German, superficial, and unmetaphysical philosophy of 
the Romanic order (Werke, IX, 161). He thinks that the Revolution 
would have been much tamer and no such seduction for men of intellect 
as it proved to be, had not Chamfort cast in his lot with it (Joyful 
Science, § 95 ; cf . § 350 ) . He, however, speaks with unstinted admiration 
of Carnot, " the soldier and the republican," calling him " great, brave, 
simple, silent" (Dawn of Day, § 167). 

f Nietzsche views democracy in other aspects on which I have not 
space to dwell. But I may note what he says of its influence on music. 
He finds German music more European than any other, since it alone 
reflects the changed European spirit; in Italian operas we still hear 
choruses of servants and soldiers, not of the people. Explicable also in 
this way is a kind of middle-class attitude of jealousy toward noblesse, 
particularly toward esprit and elegance, which is observable in German 
music; it is no longer music like that of Goethe's singer before the 
castle-gate, which pleases the hall and the king. Beethoven represents 
the new tendency, who, as compared with Goethe (one thinks of their 
encounter at Teplitz) appears like half-barbarism alongside of culture, the 
people alongside of the noble class. Nietzsche even raises the question 
whether the increasing contempt of melody among Germans is not a 
democratic symptom ( Unart ) and an after-effect of the Revolution — 
melody being akin to law-abidingness, as contrasted with the revolu- 
tionary spirit of change. See Joyful Science, § 103. 

g Alfred Fouill6e (Nietzsche et VImmoralisme, p. 11) notes that a 
German writer (Gistrow) has tried to make a place for Nietzsche's ideas 
under evolutionary socialism. 

h He once goes so far as to describe the socialists as angry with the 
commandment, " Thou shalt not steal," and wishing to have it read 
instead, " Thou shalt not own " ( The Wanderer etc., § 285 ) . In Human, 
etc., § 460, there is a picture of " the great man of the masses," which 
is displeasing enough. After considering in still another passage (Dawn 
of Day, § 188) the tendency to drunkenness among the people, he asks 
dubiously whether we are to intrust politics to them, and his sister tells 
us that he was angry with the socialist leaders because they did not 
contend with all their might against the excessive use of alcohol among 
the workers, since it was a worse enemy to them than all else which 
they counted hostile (Werke, pocket ed., V, xix; cf. xx). 

1 Nietzsche even thinks that for the time being at least culture on 
a military basis stands high above all so-called industrial culture — 
soldiers and their leaders having still a much higher relation to each 
other than workers and their employers; he sets down industrial culture 
in its present form as the lowest (gemeinste) form of existence that 
has ever been, expressly disagreeing with Herbert Spencer. " Here 
works simply the law of necessity: men want to live and have to sell 
themselves, but they despise the one who exploits this necessity and 
buys them" (Joyful Science, §40; Werke, XI, 369, §557). 

J Even a European style of dress, as distinguished from national 



492 NOTES 

styles, is developing (The Wanderer etc., §215). It is principally dif- 
ferences of language that prevent our perception of what is going on, 
which is really the vanishing of the national and the production of the 
European man (Werke, XI, 134, §425). Meyer (op. cit., p. 663) remarks 
that Madame de Stael was the first to light upon the conception of the 
" European spirit." 

k Carl Lory (Nietzsche als Geschichtsphilosoph, p. 27) considers some 
of the expectations mentioned in the text fantastic; but what are they 
compared to a suggestion, or rather question, whether we might not 
succeed in controlling the movement of our planet, or in migrating, at 
our utmost need, to another, which is made by a presumably sober English- 
man? So L. T. Hobhouse's Development and Purpose, as reviewed in Mind, 
July, 1913, p. 384. 

CHAPTER XIII 

a Cf. also the spirit of Human, etc., § 291, and the description of the 
ideal of the philosopher's life ("poverty, chastity, humility") in 
Genealogy etc., Ill, § 8. Dr. Paneth, of Vienna, who saw Nietzsche much 
in Nice during the winter of 1883-4, wrote as follows of him: 

"His small room is bare and inhospitable-looking; it certainly has 
not been chosen with a view either to ease or comfort, but solely on 
account of economy. It has no stove, no carpet, and no daintiness, and 
when I was there it was bitterly cold. Nietzsche was exceedingly friendly. 
There was nothing of false pathos or of the prophet about him, although 
I had expected it from his last work; on the contrary, he behaved in 
quite a harmless and natural way, and we began a commonplace con- 
versation about the climate and dwellings. Then he told me, but without 
the slightest affectation or assumption, how he had always felt that a 
task had been laid upon him, and that he intended to perform it to the 
utmost of his power, as far as his eyes would permit him. Just fancy, 
this man lives all alone and is half blind. In the evening he can never 
work at anything. There are many contradictions in Nietzsche, but he 
is a downright honest man, and possesses the utmost strength of will 
and effort. I asked him whether he would like me to draw the attention 
of the public to him on the occasion of the third part of Zarathustra. 
He would not object, he said, but he did not seem to like the idea. Such 
a contempt for every extra aid to success, such a freedom from all self- 
advertisement is impressive. He is absolutely convinced of his mission, 
and of his future fame; this belief gives him strength to bear all his 
misfortunes, his bodily sufferings, even his poverty. Of one thing I am 
certain, Nietzsche is chiefly a man of sentiment." (I borrow the passage 
from Mugge's Nietzsche, His Life and Work, 3d ed., p. 74.) 

bit is from the standpoint of a larger and higher idea of philosophy 
that he now criticises English philosophy — see the references to Bacon, 
Hobbes, Hume, and Locke, in contrast with Kant, Hegel, and Schopen- 
hauer, Beyond Good and Evil, § 252. 

c Real philosophers are here distinguished from philosophical la- 
borers, whose work — that of explicating and systematizing existing and 
past valuations — is secondary, however useful. Cf. also Will to Power, 
§421. 

d Nietzsche, though valuing Hegel more highly than Schopenhauer 
did (cf. the comments on Schopenhauer's "unintelligent rage" against 
him, Beyond Good and Evil, § 204 ) , speaks critically of his grandiose 
attempt to persuade us of the divinity of existence with the help of the 
sixth sense, the " historical sense," thereby delaying the victory of the 
Schopenhauerian atheistic view, Joyful Science, § 357. 

«He contrasts this with Romantic pessimism, such as he finds in the 



NOTES 493 

Schopenhauerian philosophy and in Wagnerian music. After what has 
been said in the text, no inconsistency will be felt, when, in claiming to 
be ( with the possible exception of Heraclitus ) the first " tragic phi- 
losopher," he adds, " that is, the extremest antithesis and antipodes of 
a pessimistic philosopher" (Ecce Homo, III, i, § 3). 

f In writing to Brandes of the new prefaces to his earlier works, he 
says that they may perhaps throw some light on him, " supposing that 
I am not dark in myself (dark in and for myself), as obscurrissimus 
obscurorum virorum. . . . This were possible" (Brief e, III, 275). 

e Nietzsche's singular double attitude to the world is daringly stated 
in the last two lines of a verse, which may be put into rough prose thus: 
" I will be wise because it pleases me to be so, 
And not because anybody else commands it. 
I praise God, because He made the world 
As stupidly as possible." 

(Werke, pocket ed., VI, 427.) 



CHAPTER XIV 

* I am not sure whether Will to Power, § 545, expresses a view of 
space inconsistent with that stated in the text or not; and whether 
Werke, XII, 48, § 118, also expresses a discordant view of time. On 
more than one ultimate metaphysical point, varying statements linger 
in such fragmentary notes as we have, and a final definitive word, which 
would put an end to our uncertainty, is lacking. 

b Walther Lob deals with " eternal recurrence " from the " scientific " 
point of view, and presents objections to it, in the Deutsche Rundschau, 
November, 1908. I may add that Nietzsche regards the general me- 
chanical view as useful for purposes of investigation and discovery, but 
imperfect and provisional ( Will to Power, § 1066 ) . 

c Nietzsche argues that if recurrence did not take place, this would 
be something inexplicable by accident and a contrary intention would 
have to be presupposed — an intention embodied in the structure of the 
forces. In other words, either recurrence or an arbitrary God! See 
Werke, XII, 56-7, §§ 103, 105. 

d I give also, with his kind permission, W. B. Smith's translation 
(originally printed in Poet Lore, 1905, XVI, iii, 91) : 

"O Man! Give ear! 
What saith the midnight deep and drear? 
From sleep, from sleep, 
I woke and from a dream profound; — 
The world is deep, 
And deeper than the day can sound. 
Deep is its woe — , 

Joy — deeper still than heart's distress. 
' Woe saith, Forgo! 

But joy wills Everlastingness, 
Wills deep, deep Everlastingness." 

eThe shepherd into whose throat the serpent (the idea of "eternal 
recurrence") has crawled, bites its head off at the instigation of Zara- 
thustra and spits it out — and laughs, laughed as man has never laughed 
before (Zarathustra, III, ii, §2; in xiii, §2, it is Zarathustra who has 
the experience). Zarathustra chants love for eternity (III, xvi) ; his 
disciples, too, after a festival with him, are lifted up, ready to live, and 
to live again. "Was that life?" will I say to death, "Well! once 
again ! " ( IV, xix, § 1 ) . I take it that not the bare idea of return, but 



494 NOTES 

the idea with its complex of consequences, the idea as a luminous whole, 
is what is referred to in the passage cited in the text. 

f G. Chatterton-Hill quite misconceives Nietzsche's meaning in speak- 
ing of eternal life as wished for, " because only in eternity can the 
plentitude of its [life's] expansion be realized" (op. cit., p. 71). 

e For example, by O. Kulpe, Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in 
Deutschland, pp. 61-2; Meyer, op. cit., p. 207; F. Rittelmeyer, Friedrich 
Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 67; A. Fouillee, Revue Philosophique, 
LXVI (1909), p. 527. 

h Nietzsche even has an early remark to the following effect : " The 
whole process of the world's history goes on as if free will and responsi- 
bility existed. We have here a necessary moral presupposition, a category 
of our action. That strict causality, which we can quite well grasp con- 
ceptually, is not a necessary category. The demands (Consequenz) of 
logic are inferior to the demands of the thinking which accompanies 
action" {Werke, IX, 188, § 129). 

1 See Meyer, op. cit., pp. 381 ff. ; Simmel (with an apparently con- 
clusive mathematical demonstration), op. cit., p. 250 n. ; Bichter (with 
a reference to Cantor's doctrine of the different powers of all quantities), 
op. cit., pp. 276, 326-7. Dorner, however, who, though not sympathetic, 
means to be just, and gives us, in general, criticism of Nietzsche worthy 
of the great theologian, appears to take a circular course of things for 
granted, in case there is a fixed and constant quantity of force (op. cit., 
p. 190). 

J Vaihinger (Die Philosophie des Als Ob, p. 789 n), commenting on 
this remark, suggests that 0. Ewald (Nietzsches Lehre in ihren Grund- 
begriffen) and Simmel may be right in thinking that Nietzsche held to 
" eternal return " as a " pedagogical, regulative idea," rather than dog- 
matically. 

kSee the letter to Rohde, July 15, 1882 (Brief e, II, 566). Cf. Lou 
Andreas-Salome, op. cit., pp. 140-2, 224; Richter, op. cit., pp. 64, 276; 
Drews, op. cit, p. 326; Ziegler, op. cit., p. 132. 

1 A. W. Benn, says that Nietzsche " plagiarized " the doctrine from 
the Stoics (The Greek Philosophers, 2d ed., p. 335 n.). 

m It is singular that Nietzsche does not notice what would ordinarily 
be counted a defect in his view, namely, that no conscious continuity 
between this life and the next is asserted — we do not remember our 
previous existence and presumably in our future state shall have no 
recollection of this. The average man has little concern about a future 
individual, who, however like him, is not himself, i.e., a continuation of 
his present consciousness. I can only suggest that here too Nietzsche must 
have judged others by himself. To him, if the lives were identical, if 
there was an absolute repetition of the same thing, it was of small moment 
whether there was a thread of memory connecting them or not. That 
the same commonplace thing should be eternally repeating itself — this 
irrespective of anything else, was what depressed him, as it was the 
possibility of an eternal repetition of sublime things that lifted him up. 
For the moment he, as it were, became pure speculative intelligence, intent 
only to know whether anything going on in the universe was worth while. 



CHAPTER XV 

a It is sometimes said that the same stimulus, applied to different, 
sense organs, gives rise to correspondingly different sensations — so H. 
Wildon Carr, Philosophical Review, May, 1914, p. 257. 

b Cf . the early remark before quoted : " The sensation is not the 



NOTES 4,95 

result of the cell, but the cell is the result of the sensation, i.e., an artistic 
projection, an image" (Werke, IX, 194). Of the complications in such 
a view from the physiological standpoint Nietzsche is well aware — see 
Beyond Good ana Evil, § 15. 

c Nietzsche finds nothing really unchangeable in the world of 
chemistry — e.g., it is superficial to say that things so different as diamond, 
graphite, and coal are the same, simply because they have a common 
chemical substance and there is no loss in weight in the process of trans- 
formation ( Will to Power, § 623 ) . 

d As to the pure ideality of straight lines, circles, numbers, see 
Human, etc., §§11, 18, 19; Werke, XIV, 34, §68; 42-3, §81; also p. 320 
(the objects of mathematics "do not exist"). 

e The " I " is also spoken of as an attempt to simplify our infinitely 
complicated nature (Werke, XI, 291, §335), and again as the result of 
a doubling process, as when we say "the lightning lightens" (ibid., 
XIV, 329, § 164). 

f Even to a theologian like Heinrich Weinel, the soul is no longer 
a thing, a " simple and hence imperishable substance," such as science 
before Kant strove to demonstrate (op. cit., p. 6). Nietzsche finds as 
little " one soul " as " two souls " in our breast, rather " many mortal 
souls" (Werke, XIV, 37, § 75). 

gAs to the falsity of the outer world, Nietzsche sometimes uses 
strong language, but it is exact from his point of view: it is a "product 
of fantasy," a " world of phantoms," " poetry," " the primitive poetry of 
mankind" (Werke, XII, 36, §69; 170, §351; Dawn of Day, §118). He 
thinks that whatever may be our philosophical standpoint [ordinary 
realism he hardly considers as a philosophical standpoint], this falsity 
(Irrthiimlichkeit) is the surest and solidest thing we can still lay hold 
of (Beyond Good and Evil, §34). Riehl asks (op. cit., p. 130) how we 
can speak of falsity, if we do not know the truth; but one is a negative, 
the other a positive judgment — Nietzsche himself observes that the des- 
truction of an illusion does not of itself give us the truth, but may 
simply make the field of our ignorance wider (Werke, XIII, 138, §318; 
Will to Power, § 603 ) . The illusoriness of the physical world has been 
often asserted, e.g., by Hume, of whom Norman Kemp Smith says, 
"Hume's argument rests throughout on the supposition that perishing 
subjective states are the only possible objects of mind, and that it is 
these perishing states which natural belief constrains us to regard as 
independent existence. Such belief is obviously, on the above interpreta- 
tion, sheer illusion and utterly false" (Mind, April, 1905, pp. 169, 170). 
See also Ralph Barton Perry's admirable statement of Hume's view, 
Present Philosophical Tendencies, pp. 138-9. It is curious that Nietzsche 
refers rarely to Hume, and but twice to a critical point in his philosophy, 
viz., his conception of causality (Werke, XIV, 27, §49; XVI, 51). His 
general view, however, might well receive the epithet, " psychologism " 
with which Perry characterizes Hume's view — or even a stronger and 
still more barbarous one, viz., " biographism," for he says, " Man may 
reach out as far as he will with his knowledge and seem to himself as 
objective as possible — in the end he gets nothing from it but his own 
biography" (Human, etc., §513). 

h Simplification is spoken of as " the chief need " of organic existence, 
Werke, XII, 46, §83; cf. 10, §18. On the illusion of identity, see ibid., 
XIV, 22, §38; 33, §66; 35, §70. Nietzsche had maintained early in his 
career that logic rested on presuppositions to which nothing in the actual 
world corresponds, e.g., that of the likeness of things, and that of the 
identity of the same thing at different points of time (Human, etc., § 11; 
The Wanderer etc., § 12; Werke, XI, 179, §65). 

i Error (i.e., opinions born of subjective need and posited as objective 



496 NOTES 

realities) is, indeed, so much in possession of the field and has become 
so inwrought into the human constitution, that truth, even when it is 
born, can hardly live save in combination with it, being too forceless of 
itself {Werke, XII, 47, §85; cf. XIV, 269, §40, where is the strong 
statement, " as bloom belongs to the apple, so does falsehood belong to 
life"). Error of a certain sort is even spoken of as a presupposition of 
knowledge, e.g., ideas of " being," " identity," " substance," " permanence," 
the "unconditioned"; they are all "logical fictions" {Werke, XII, 23, 
§39; 24, §41; 46, §82; 48, §89; 208, §442; XIV, 29, §53; 31, §59; 
Beyond Good and Evil, § 4 ) , but at the same time standards by which 
we measure and judge things. Though we have discovered our errors, we 
are often none the less obliged to act according to them and as if we 
believed them (Werke, XIII, 224, §284) — they are imbedded in language 
and we cannot get rid of them (Werke, XI, 180, § 69; The Wanderer etc., 
§ 11). Nietzsche himself frequently speaks of sensible phenomena as inde- 
pendent realities, like the rest of us. 

3 Knowledge ( in this sense ) may be something that only the phi- 
losopher, who is conceived of as the strongest type of man, can endure; 
Nietzsche distinguishes between what is necessary for the philosopher 
and for most men (Werke, XV, 1st ed., 294 ff). 

k At the same time there is a note of pathos in saying this. It 
appears also in the exclamation, " Ah ! we must embrace untruth, and 
now the error becomes lie and the lie a condition of life"! (Werke, XII, 
48, § 87 ) . He had said earlier, " A question lies heavy on the tongue 
and does not wish to be articulate: can man consciously hold to untruth, 
and, if he must, is not death preferable?" (Human, etc., §34). I need 
scarcely say that Nietzsche does not mean that all illusions or errors 
are beneficial — he notes that some may be harmful, even if they make 
happy for a time (cf. Will to Power, §§ 453-4). 

iHow far a view of this sort resembles Pragmatism, I leave to those 
better acquainted with the latter than I to say. Rene Berthelot, while 
remarking that Nietzsche did not know the term Pragmatism, calls him 
the first to perceive distinctly a great part of the ideas currently so 
designated ( TJn romantisme utilitaire, p. 33 ; see, however, A. W. Moore's 
critical comment, Philosophical Review, November, 1912, pp. 707-9). 
Richard Miiller-Frienfels finds expressed in Nietzsche " the thoughts 
which have grown into a system as Pragmatism in America, as Human- 
ism in England, and which in Germany has much that is kindred to 
them, above all in the biological theory of knowledge of Mach, Avenarius, 
Jerusalem, Simmel, Vaihinger, and others" (Archiv fur Geschichte der 
Philosophic, April, 1913, pp. 339-58). W. Eggenschwyler, on the other 
hand, emphasizes the contrasts between Nietzsche and James's views in 
an article, "War Nietzsche Pragmatist?" (ibid., October, 1912, pp. 35-47). 

m See Will to Power, § 503, where it is said that the whole apparatus 
of so-called knowledge is an apparatus for abstracting and simplifying — 
its aim being not knowledge proper, but acquiring control. So practical 
interpretation is distinguished from explanation in ibid., § 604; and ordi- 
nary logic is treated as a falsifying process (proceeding as it does on 
the supposition of identical cases) — it does not come from a will to truth 
(ibid., §512). At other times he departs from this strict conception 
of knowledge. In one place he even denies that there is any pure, 
will-less subject of knowledge (Genealogy etc., Ill, § 12) ; and in another 
he calls it a fatal mistake to posit a peculiar impulse to knowledge 
(which goes blindly after truth, without reference to advantage or 
injury), and then to separate from it the whole world of practical 
interests ( Will to Power, § 423 ) . But the inconsistencies are no greater 
than in his varying views of truth, and in effect correspond to them. 
Nietzsche does not reach a definitive position here, any more than at 



NOTES 497 

some other points in his thinking; in the main, however, he holds to the 
old theoretic meanings of knowledge and truth, simply urging that it 
is difficult, if not impossible, to attain knowledge and truth actually. 

n Nietzsche is skeptical of the objective character of what goes by 
the name of history — it is more interpretation than fact (Werke, XIII, 
64, § 158; XIV, 146, §303; Philologica, I, 329). 

° Cf . Beyond Good and Evil, §12, where the new psychologist, after 
putting an end to superstition about the soul and falling into a new 
desert and mistrust, is described as learning at last to invent and, who 
knows? perhaps to find. 

p Richter (op. cit., p. 282) refers to a passage (Werke, XV, 1st ed., 
p. 295), in which Nietzsche speaks of our not receiving, but ourselves 
positing sense-perceptions. But the perceptions, I take it, are to be dis- 
tinguished from the stimuli (Reize) that give rise to them — the former 
we do produce, but the latter we receive. The point with Nietzsche is 
that our sensations or sense-perceptions are not impressions (hence copies, 
or at least as much like the original as the image which a die leaves in 
the wax is to the die) — that we actively create them. See Nietzsche's early 
discussion of the subject, summarize ante, pp. 50-1; also a late utter- 
ance quoted by Meyer (op. cit., p. 589), "In all perception . . . what 
essentially happens is an action, still more exactly an imposing of forms 
(Formen-Aufzwingen) : only the superficial speak of 'impressions.'" 

Q Cf ., as to deductions from moral needs, reflections on Kant, Will 
to Power, §410; on Hegel, ibid., §416; on philosophers in general, 
Beyond Good and Evil, §6; Will to Power, §412. As to conclusions 
from needs of happiness, comfort, etc., see Will to Power, §§ 425, 36, 
171-2, 455; Beyond Good and Evil, § 210; Genealogy etc., I, § 1; III, § 24. 
Nietzsche even calls the " desirable " a canon without meaning in relation 
to the world as a totality (Will to Power, §§ 709, 711). Nor are clearness 
and irrefutableness really marks or standards of truth. To hold that 
clearness proves truth is childishness — unclear ideas may be nearer truth 
(ibid., §358). As to irrefutableness, see ibid., §§535, 541. 

rln Will to Power, §598, the idea that there is no truth (called the 
nihilistic belief) is treated as a recreation for the warrior of knowledge 
who is ever in struggle with ugly truths — with the implication, then, 
that after the recreation he will go on with the struggle. 

sCf. Will to Power, § 604 (there is no datum, everything being fluid, 
unseizable, the most permanent thing being our opinions ) . In one place 
(Werke, XIII, 49, § 120) he even proposes — following, I imagine, the 
extreme views of Lange — to do away with the distinction between phe- 
nomena and things in themselves (cf. Vaihinger's summary statement of 
Lange's views, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, pp. 756-7 ) . 

t Cf . Dorner's happy statement of Nietzsche's view : " In this actual 
world there are no individuals, no species, and, strictly speaking, also 
no wills, but only actions and reactions, centers of action and reaction, 
and the word ' world ' signifies only the total aspect of these actions " 
(op. cit., pp. 137). 

u See the striking summary paragraph, Will to Power, § 567 : Each 
center of force has its perspective for the rest of the world, i.e., its quite 
definite valuation and way of acting and resisting. The " apparent 
world " reduces itself to specific sorts of action proceeding from such 
centers. The " world " is only a word for the total play of such actions. 
Reality consists in just this particular sort of action and reaction of 
each individual to the whole. There hence remains no shadow of right 
to speak here of appearance. There is no " other," no " true," no 'essen- 
tial being — therewith would be designated a world without action and 
reaction. The contrast between the apparent and the " true " world hence 
becomes the contrast between " world " and " nothing." Cf. also ibid., 



498 NOTES 

§ 708 (becoming is not appearance; it is perhaps the world of being that 
is appearance ) . 

v By will Nietzsche means not so much a fixed entity 6r faculty, as 
a moving point — he speaks of " Willens-Punktationen " that continually 
increase or lose their power (ibid., §715). Again, though a who that 
feels pleasure and wills power (i.e., a single subject) is not necessary, 
there must be contrasts, oppositions, and so relative unities (ibid., § 693). 
When Nietzsche rejects will as illusion (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 19), 
Kichter remarks that he has in mind the consciously aiming will, con- 
ceived as something simple ( op. cit., p. 225 ) . On the other hand, Nietz- 
sche uses will distinctly in the sense of something that selects and accom- 
plishes (Will to Power, §662), and expressly dissents from Schopen- 
hauer's view of the will as desire and impulse merely — will, he says, deals 
with ordinary impulses as their master (ibid., §§84, 95, 260, 668). Still 
he does occasionally speak of will to power as desire (ibid., § 619). Ulti- 
mately it is neither a being or a becoming, but a pathos — from which a 
becoming or an action results (ibid., §635; cf. Werke, XIII, 210, §483). 

W I am compelled to borrow here from Riehl (op. cit., p. 60). Indeed, 
Nietzsche still says that the view that every object seen from within is a 
subject, belongs to the past (Will to Power, §474; he probably means 
a conscious subject, or else uses subject in the technical sense already 
criticised ) . On the other hand, in ibid., § 658, he speaks of " thinking, 
feeling, willing in all that lives," and in Zarathustra, IV, xi, he comes 
near popular animism in speaking of the pine tree as reaching after 
power, commanding, victorious, etc. — though the language may be taken 
as poetical. 

x Julius Bahnsen, an early follower of Schopenhauer, seems to have 
had a similar view, reality being taken by him as " a living antagonism 
of mutually crossing forces or acts of will" (Der Widerspruch, I, 436). 
The term " Voluntarism," Rudolf Eisler says, was first used by Ferdinand 
Tonnies in 1883, Paulsen in 1892 having brought it into currency (zur 
Oeltung) ; cf. Eisler's Worterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, art., 
" Voluntarismus." Wundt's view, as stated by Kulpe (Die Philosophie 
der Gegenwart in Deutschland, 3d ed., pp. 102-3), and also the reasoning 
by which he arrives at it, are in general like Nietzsche's: "All ideas 
(Vorstellungen) of objects rest on an effect that the will experiences; 
it suffers in that it is affected, and it is [in turn] active in that the 
suffering stirs it to an idea-producing activity. The object, however, 
that affects the ego is in itself unknown. We can only infer from our 
experience that what causes (erregt) suffering must itself be acting. 
Since there is absolutely no other activity known to us than that of 
our will, we can trace our suffering back only to some foreign will, and 
so what happens in general to the reciprocal action of different wills. 
The world may therefore be interpreted as the totality of will-activities, 
which in the course of their determination of one another . . . come to 
arrange themselves in a developmental series of will-unities of varied 
content." 

y If we bear this in mind, we may to a certain extent explain Nietz- 
sche's apparently contradictory views as to the place of conscious will 
in man ( and in the world in general ) . He uses " will " sometimes in 
the sense of conscious will, in which sense it is not universal or elementary 
(cf. Dawn of Day, § 124), but again as practically identical with natural 
forces, the urge and inner ground of all life and activity. In his view, 
consciousness plays little part in physiological adaptations and organiza- 
tion — it is a fitful, broken, atomistic thing at best and more a resultant 
than a cause (cf. Will to Power, §§523, 526). It comes when there is 
need of it, and is used by deeper forces that may in turn dispense with 
it, when it has done its work. It is these deeper forces that are will 



NOTES 499 

proper (i.e., something commanding, imperative, bent on rule), the same 
in nature as in man. I do not mean that considerations of this sort meet 
all difficulties: some of his contradictions are perhaps incapable of reso- 
lution, e.g., that between a mechanistic and a teleological view of life. 
Nietzsche is now inclined in one way and now in another (cf. Werke, 
XIV, 353, §215, with Beyond Good and Evil, §36; Werke, XIII, 170, 
§ 392; Will to Power, § 712). Still his drift as a whole, and indeed the 
particular significance of his doctrine of will to power, are anti- 
mechanistic. In ibid., § 712, he almost suggests the Bergsonian view, 
" Absolute exclusion of mechanism and matter : both only forms of ex- 
pression for the lower stages, the least spiritual shape that the will to 
power takes " ( " die entgeistigste Form des Affekts, des ' Willens zur 
Macht '"). Had Nietzsche lived longer, he might have produced an 
articulated view to this effect. 

z It must be admitted that §§ 563, 565 of Will to Power derive quality 
from differences of quantity, the contradiction being only obviated if 
" quality " here means something different from what it does in § 564, 
namely, a more or less aesthetic valuation, a human idiosyncrasy. It 
must be remembered that the grouping of paragraphs in Will to Power 
is the work of a later editor. 

aa This does not mean that Nietzsche did not recognize the influence 
of environment — see his remarks on the shaping of races, Werke, XIV, 
233, § 787. All the same, " the psychology of these M. Flauberts is 
in summa false: they see always simply the action of the outer world 
and the ego being formed (quite as Taine?), — they know only the weak 
in will, in whom desire takes the place of will" (ibid., XIV, 199, § 391). 
Again, " The theory of environment, now the Parisian theory par ex- 
cellence, is itself a proof of a fateful disgregation of personality" (ibid., 
XIV, 215, §434). Cf. Dorner's comment, op. cit., p. 139. 

bb The sexual instinct is viewed in Will to Power, § 680, not as a 
mere necessity for the race, but as an expression of the strength or power 
of the individual, a maximal expression of power, which is superficially 
inconsistent with the view of propagation as the result of limited power 
expressed in ibid., § 654. 

cc Nietzsche argues against Darwinism that the utility of an organ 
does not explain its rise, since during the greater part of the time it was 
forming, it may neither have preserved the individual nor been useful to 
him, least of all in the struggle with outer conditions and enemies (Will 
to Power, § 647 ; cf . Genealogy etc., II, § 12, where it is explained that 
the origin of a thing may have nothing to do with the use to which it 
is put by a superior power). 

dd There is no mechanical necessity in the relation of the parts of an 
organism — much may be commanded that cannot be fully performed; 
hence, strain, e.g., of the stomach (Werke, XIII, 170, §392; cf. 172, 
§394). 

ee The statement in the paragraph cited, " not ' increase of conscious- 
ness/ but heightening of power is the end," may possibly be directed 
against Fouillee, who also put will at the basis of things, but " will for 
consciousness" (according to A. Lalande, Philosophical Review, May, 
1912, p. 294). 

ff Nietzsche thinks that in a way pleasure rests on pain, being the 
sense of an obstacle that has been overcome. If the pleasure is to be 
great, the pain must be long, the tension of the bow extreme ( Will to 
Power, §658; cf. §§661, 694, 699). Pain, while different from pleasure, 
is not then its exact opposite; in will to pleasure, there is involved will 
to pain (ibid., §§490, 505, 669). He even goes so far as to say, "in 
itself there is no pain" (ibid., §699); Schopenhauer had asserted the 
relativity of pain, but to the will (not necessarily to the intellect). 



500 NOTES 

Nietzsche does not think that pleasure and pain cause anything, being 
simply accompaniments of processes that would go on without them 
(ibid., §478). In accordance with this general view of the nature and 
necessity of pain, is a remark to the effect that the simple unsatisfaction 
of our impulses (hunger, sex, or the impulse to move) contains nothing 
to lower our pitch — rather works to stimulate us (ibid., §§697, 702). 
There are two kinds of pain, one that acts as a stimulus to the sense 
of power, another that arises after the expenditure of power; and to 
these correspond two kinds of pleasure, one such as we have in going 
to sleep in a state of exhaustion, the other the pleasure of victory (ibid., 
§703). 

gg Nietzsche even speaks of a " thinking " [i.e., the equivalent of our 
thinking] in the pre-organic world and calls it an enforcing of forms 
there, as in the case of the crystal. In our thinking the essential thing is 
the putting of new material into old schemata (= Procrustes bed) 
(Will to Power, §499). 

hh Cf . Nietzsche's own statement: "To become artist (creating), saint 
(loving), and philosopher (knowing) in one person — my practical aim" 
(Werke, XII, 213, §448). The passage is perhaps reminiscent of his 
early aspiration, but this changed in form more than in substance. He 
says, indeed, in Ecce Homo (preface, § 2) that he is a disciple of Dionysus 
and would rather be a satyr than a saint, but he here means by " saint " 
one who turns his back on life. Even asceticism Nietzsche did not alto- 
gether discountenance, but the sort he favors was in the interests of life, 
not against it. Those whom he regards as the supreme type of men 
practise this kind of asceticism and find their pleasure in it (The Anti- 
christian, §57). In speaking of the future "lords of the earth" (who 
are to replace God for men and win the unconditional confidence of the 
ruled) he emphasizes first "their new sanctity (Heiligkeit), their re- 
nunciation of happiness and comfort " ( Werke, pocket ed., VII, 486, § 36 ) . 
Purity and renunciation (of some kind) are the essential elements in 
the concept of the saint (cf. the sympathetic portrayal of the saint as 
representing the highest instinct of purity in Beyond Good and Evil, 
§271, also Genealogy etc., I, §6; and the description of the redemptive 
man of great love and great contempt, who must sometime come, at the 
close of § 24 of Genealogy etc., II ) . 

" With this view of will to power as the essence of the world, 
accident may be looked at from a new point of view. It is true that each 
center of power lives and acts in the midst of a realm of the accidental; 
but this accident itself turns out to be the action of other centers of 
power. Accident really means then no more than that my will to power 
is crossed by somebody else's will to power. It would seem to follow 
then that if the power of the world could be organized, accident would 
disappear. Nietzsche does not draw the conclusion, and perhaps would 
have regarded such a consummation undesirable; but the conclusion 
seems inevitable. 

CHAPTER XVI 

a In another way the variety and freedom of individual opinion is, 
to Nietzsche, an advantage (cf. the tone of Werke, XI, 196, § 102; 371-2, 
§ 566 ) . The greater the range of difference, the more likelihood of finding 
at last a view that may unite mankind again (cf. the striking language 
with which he describes the competition of all egos to find the thought 
that will stand over mankind as its star, Werke, XII, 360, § 679 ) . 

t> Fouillee remarks that Guyau felt the same as Nietzsche as to the 
need of a critique of morality, and that he himself had criticised Kant 
on this score (in his Critiques des systemes de morale contemporaine, 



NOTES 501 

1883), as had Renouvier and Charles Secretan before him — see his Nietz- 
sche et Vlmmoralisme, pp. 54-5. 

c E. and A. Horneffer refer to Wundt, Liebmann, and Riehl, as well 
as Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lotze, as holding that morality is something 
well-established and known — the only questions open being as to its 
formulation or the basis to be given to it (Das klassische Ideal, pp. 
213-8). A recent writer on Nietzsche speaks of "moral axioms" (H. L. 
Stewart, Nietzsche and the Ideals of Modern Germany, pp. 87, 107). 

d A passage from Emerson may be quoted here : " Now shall we, 
because a good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, there are no 
doubts and lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cowardly 
manner, and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness? 
Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue?" ("Mon- 
taigne," in Representative Men ) . 

e William James once confessed something of this feeling to me. The 
fact that morality (as ordinarily understood) is something customary, 
plays a part, no doubt, in rendering it uninteresting, Nietzsche remarking 
that what is expected, usual, neutral for the feelings, makes the greater 
part of what the people calls its Sittlichkeit (Werke, XI, 212, § 133). 

f Cf., for example, the qualifications he makes in offering his ety- 
mological derivation of moral terms in Genealogy of Morals, I, and what 
is implied in speaking of the need of essays under university auspices 
on the subject (in the note at the close) ; also the admission of the 
conjectural nature of his views as to the connection of guilt and suf- 
fering (ibid., II, §6), the origin of "bad conscience" {ibid., II, §16), 
and the connection of " guilt " and " duty " with religious presuppositions 
(ibid., II, §21). I have already noted the significance of the full title 
of the Genealogy of Morals, namely, Zur Genealogie der Moral. H. L. 
Stewart, in attacking Nietzsche for incompetence and " incredible self- 
confidence," hardly bears these things in mind (op. cit., pp. 43-4). 



CHAPTER XVII 

a Nietzsche remarks that we cannot solve the problem of the worth 
of life in general, because, for one thing, we cannot take a position outside 
life ( Twilight of the Idols, v, § 5 ; cf . ii, § 2 ) . 

b Cf . Simmel's comments, op. cit., p. 231; also as he is quoted in 
Nietzsche's Werke (pocket ed.), V, xxxii. See also Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 
180-1, and A. W. Benn, International Journal of Ethics, October, 1908, 
p. 19. Nietzsche's sister recognizes that it would have been better if he 
had used expressions like " amoralisch," " Amoralismus " (Werke, pocket 
ed., IX, xxv). On the other hand, Nietzsche became somewhat indif- 
ferent to misconceptions of his meaning, and said late in life, with a 
bit of malice, that it had become his habit not to write anything that 
did not bring those "in a hurry" to despair (preface, §5, to Dawn of 
Day; cf. Werke, XIV, 359, §225). 

c This is not inconsistent with the view that the mores to which 
obedience is given may have originated more or less with ruling persons 
in the distant past, in accordance with the possible suggestions of 
Werke, XIII, 190, § 421. It is said there, in a discussion of punishment 
considered as a reaction of the powerful, that before the morality of 
the mos (whose canon is "everything traditional must be honored") 
stands the morality of the ruling person ( whose canon is that " the 
ruler alone shall be honored"). "Before" here may mean in time or 
in rank and authority — I think the latter. Only if it means " earlier 
in time," is there basis for Willard Huntington Wright's view that 
morality, as understood by Nietzsche, " implies the domination of certain 



502 NOTES 

classes which, in order to inspire reverence in arbitrary dictates, have 
invested their codes with an authority other than a human one " ( What 
Nietzsche Taught, p. 89) — I know no other passage which looks that 
way. Morality, in the general sense now under consideration, does not 
spring, in Nietzsche's estimation, from the dominance of any class, but 
from the necessities of group-life. Indeed, so far as the dominating 
class shape a morality, it is, as will appear later, one of their own, more 
or less different from that of the group at large. 

d Mos or 8itte is thereby differentiated from habit as it may exist 
among animals (see Wundt's Ethics, Engl, tr., I, 131; cf. also p. 156, 
where habit, usage, and Sitte are distinguished ) . 

e Sophocles, for example, describes them in language approaching to 
accuracy when he says in the " Antigone," 

" They are not of today nor yesterday, 
But live for ever, nor can man assign 
When first they sprang into being; " 
he passes into superstition when he assigns to them a Divine origin. It 
is to be noted, too, that Sophocles distinguishes them from a prince's 
" edicts." 

*Cf. implications of this sort in Werke, IX, 154; Human, etc., §99; 
The Wanderer etc., § 40 ; Mixed Opinions etc., § 89 ; also Genealogy of 
Morals, II, § 8 ( where buying and selling are said to be older than the 
beginnings of social organization), and II, §16 (where, in developing a 
theory of " bad conscience," a wild state of man, before individuals came 
under the ban of society and peace, is spoken of ) . It may be noted that 
Aristotle spoke of the " clanless, lawless, heartless man," as described 
by Homer (Politics, I, ii). Nietzsche appears to have in mind formless, 
roving populations {Genealogy etc., II, §17). 

g Only so can I reconcile passages cited in the preceding note with 
the view now to be developed. But for the citations from Genealogy etc., 
one might conjecture that the idea of a pre-social state belonged to 
Nietzsche's earlier periods alone; he now even speaks of the social origin 
and meaning of our impulses and affects — there is no " state of nature " 
for them {Werke, XIII, 112, §224). Dewey and Tufts say, "Psycho- 
logically the socializing process is one of building up a social self. Imi- 
tation and suggestion . . . are the aids in building up such a self" {op. 
cit., p. 11), that is, they too postulate a hypothetical self, not yet social, 
to start with. 

hThe group -connection of an individual appeared also in the fact 
that one member of a group might be attacked for the offense of another 
member, though he himself had no part in it, and that, on the other hand, 
the guilt of an individual was felt by the group as its own (Dawn of 
Day, § 9 ; cf . Dewey and Tufts, op. cit., pp. 28-9 ) . 

i Cf . the striking language, in entire agreement with the primitive 
view, of the late Father Tyrrell ( " A much-abused Letter " ) : " In such 
a man [a truly social individual] the general mind and outlook supplants 
the personal and private; the general ends, interests, and affections 
absorb and transcend the particular; and, as an active member of the 
social organism, his internal and external energies are reinforced by 
those of the whole community, which acts with him and through him." 
H. L. Stewart is misled in saying that Nietzsche attributed " herd- 
morality " to a late epoch of decadence and failed to recognize the fact 
of primitive gregariousness (op. cit., pp. 44-6). 

i Rene Berthelot remarks that since a large part of the content of 
the moral conscience of individuals is constituted by the collective interest 
of the social group to which they belong, it follows that in order that 
there may be no contradiction of duties, there should be society, but 
not societies, or that different social groups should not be in conflict. 



NOTES 503 

" But to speak exactly, society does not exist ; what exists is societies, 
that is to say different groupings in which individuals find themselves 
united. To speak of society simply is to use the manner of speech of 
an attorney-general, not that of a man of science or of a philosopher " 
(Un romantisme utilitaire, I, 181). 

k Cf . a striking picture of man's dread of isolation in early times 
and its moral significance : " To be alone, to feel detached, neither to 
obey nor to rule, to have the signification of an individual — this was 
then no pleasure, rather a punishment : one was condemned ' to be an 
individual.' To be free in thinking was discomfort itself. While we 
feel law and regulation as compulsion and loss, formerly egoism was the 
painful thing, a real misery. To be oneself, to value according to one's 
own weight and measure — for this there was no taste. Inclinations of 
such an order were felt as something insane, since every distress and 
every fear were associated with being alone. Then ' free will ' had bad 
conscience for a very near neighbor; and the unfreer a man was in his 
conduct, the more flock-instinct and not personal judgment expressed itself 
in it, the more moral did he feel himself to be" (Joyful Science, § 117). 
Cf. the general remarks on man's need of social recognition by William 
James, Psychology, I, 293. 

1 Cf. the remark of William James, " The impulse to pray is a 
necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the em- 
pirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its 
only adequate Socius in an ideal world" (op. cit., I, 316). 



CHAPTER XVIII 

a Nietzsche in writing to Brandes (see Werke, pocket ed., IX, xxvii) 
says that many words have with him particular shades of meaning 
(Salzen) , but in this case he does little more than conform to current 
German usage. 

b Cf . the reference (Dawn of Day, §9) to those who depart from 
tradition, prompted by motives like those which originally led to its 
establishment, viz., the group's good; also the line, 

" Strange to the people, and yet useful to the people " 
in " Scherz, List und Rache," § 49 (prefixed to Joyful Science)-, still 
again the description of the Schopenhauer type of man and reformer in 
" Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 4. 

c Cf. William Blake's view of evil as one of the pair of wedded con- 
traries without which there is no progression (Works, ed. by E. J. Ellis' 
and W. B. Yeats, II, 63) ; also the views of Jacob Bohme as given by 
Karl Joel (op. cit., pp. 194-5). Lou Andreas-Salome happily states Nietz- 
sche's position (op. cit., pp. 199-200). See further, Will to Power, §§ 1015, 
1017, 1019. From a slightly different point of view Nietzsche says 
(Werke, XII, 86, §168), "We sestheticians of the highest order would 
not miss also crimes and vice and torments of the soul and errors — and 
a society of the wise would probably create for itself an evil (hose) 
world in addition. I mean that it is no argument against the aesthetic 
nature (Kiinstlerschaft) of God that evil and pain exist — however, 
against His 'goodness.' But what is goodness? The disposition to help 
and do good to, which just so far presupposes those for whom things 
go badly, and who are bad (schlecht)"\ 

d Cf . what he wrote a friend in 1881, "It grieves me to hear that 
you suffer, that anything is lacking to you, that you have lost some one — 
although in my case suffering and deprivation belong to the normal and 
not, as for you, to the unnecessary and irrational side of existence " 
(quoted by Lou Andreas-Salome, op. cit., p. 16). Cf. a letter to Brandes, 



504 NOTES 

Brief e, III, 302; also Werke, XIII, 219, §469. Matthew Arnold's 
" Stanzas in memory of Edward Quillinan " and the passage in New- 
man's Parochial and Plain Sermons beginning " A smooth and easy life " 
(Vol. V, p. 337) may also be referred to here. 

e Dawn of Day, § 354. Cf. the striking poems, " To Grief " and " To 
Life," by Lou Andreas-Salome, reproduced in Halevy's La Vie de Fr6d6ric 
'Nietzsche, pp. 251 and 254; the first was dedicated to Nietzsche (summer 
of 1882), the second set to music by Nietzsche (the music and a transla- 
tion of the words are given at the close of Vol. XVII of the English ed. 
of the Works).. 

* Montaigne is frank: "Let the philosophers say what they will, the 
main thing at which we all aim, even in virtue itself, is pleasure. It- 
pleases me to rattle in their ears this word, which they so nauseate to 
hear, etc." (Essays, I, xix). 

sCf. Werke, XII, 90, §177; 87, §171 (where love and cruelty are 
said to be not opposites, but discoverable always in the firmest and best 
natures — e.g., in the Christian God, a being very wise and excogitated 
without moral prejudices) ; also Will to Power, §852. 

h Along the lines of the "theodicy" referred to earlier (pp. 233-4) 
Nietzsche says, "Whoever believes in good and evil [i.e., as strictly anti- 
thetical], can never treat evil as a means to good; and every teleological 
world-view becomes impossible which does not break absolutely with 
morality" (Werke, XIII, 126, §287). 

1 Nietzsche has a hard saying as to the classical type of character, 
asking " Whether the moral monstra [those in wh/mi the ■ good ' impulses 
are alone developed! are not of necessity romanticists, in word and 
deed," something of " evil " being required in the make-up of the classical 
type ( Will to Power, § 848 ) . 

3 Cf . Mabel Atkinson on vices as the outgrown virtues of our animal 
ancestry (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1908, p. 302). 



CHAPTER XIX 

a See Beyond Good and Evil, §260; Genealogy etc., I, §16. Richter 
thinks that it was just this diversity and contrariety of moral judgments 
today that led Nietzsche to the hypothesis of original class moralities 
(op. cit., p. 314) . 

k Cf . the New Testament passage (James i, 27) where one of the 
marks of " pure " religion is said to be keeping oneself " unspotted from 
the world," and Matthew Arnold's description of the " children of the 
Second Birth," the " small transfigured band " 

" Whose one bond is, that all have been 
Unspotted by the world." 
in " Stanzas in Memory of Oberman." 

cEmile Faguet (En lisant Nietzsche, pp. 327-8) makes the criticism 
that there are not merely these two moralities, but an indefinite number. 
Riehl (op. cit., p. 117) reflects on Nietzsche in the same way. But this 
is superficial. Nietzsche explicitly recognizes the numerous types, and 
simply singles out those that seem to him most important. 

d Schopenhauer in his Grundlage der Moral used the term " slave 
morality" for that which is practised in obedience to a command (such 
as Kant posited). 

eN. Awxentieff (Kultur-ethisches Ideal Nietzsches, p. 104), thinks 
that the primitive group was, according to Nietzsche's view (he cites 
Joyful Science, § 23 ) , a completely indifferentiated mass, homogeneous 
throughout; but this is an exaggerated statement. It is true that Nietz- 
sche's " great individuals " are a late product of social evolution, but 



NOTES 505 

individuals sufficiently marked off to lead and rule have characterized 
every stage of society, at least above the hunting and nomadic. 

f Dewey and Tufts say, " The term good, when used in our judgments 
upon others (as in a 'good' man), may have a different history [from 
that in the economic sphere]. As has been noted, it may come from class 
feeling; or from the praise we give to acts as they immediately please. 
It may be akin to noble, or fine, or admirable" (op. cit., p. 184). This 
is a beginning along the line of distinctions and refinements such as 
Nietzsche's, but only a beginning. On the other hand, Hoffding thinks 
that the doctrine of master- and slave-morality was falsely derived (op. 
cit., pp. 142, 156). It may be added that Nietzsche does not always use 
" gut und schlecht " and " gut und hose " in the special senses described 
in the text, but sometimes quite generally. 

e Further descriptions of the subject-class and their type of morality 
may be found in Werke, XIV, 67, § 133, and Genealogy etc., I, § 14. In 
Beyond Good and Evil, § 260, they are spoken of as the " subjugated, 
oppressed, suffering, unfree, uncertain of themselves and weary." In 
Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 3, their virtues are described as resignation, 
modesty, prudence, and industry. 

h Cf. the striking paragraph, Human, etc., § 81, on the difference in 
standpoint and feeling between the doer of an injury and the sufferer 
from it. 

1 Wundt remarks, " Language is the oldest witness to the course of 
development of all human ideas. Hence it is to language that we must 
put our first questions in investigating the origin of moral ideas" (op. 
cit., I, 23 ) . On the other hand, Westermarck discards all questions of 
etymology as irrelevant to the subject, adding, " The attempt to apply 
the philological method to an examination of moral concepts has, in 
my opinion, proved a failure — which may be seen from Mr. Bayne's book 
on ' The Idea of God and the Moral Sense in the Light of Language ' " 
(Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, I, 133) — apparently a large 
conclusion from a slight premise. 

3 Riehl says that this " class " view of Nietzsche's is not a new one — 
Paul Ree having advanced it in Die Entstehung des Gewissens (1885 — 
Beyond Good and Evil appeared in the same year, but Genealogy of Morals 
two years later), and having been able to cite as authorities P. E. Miiller, 
Grote, and Welcker. Nietzsche, in the preface to Genealogy etc., refers 
only to Ree's earlier work, Der Vrsprung der moralischen Empfindungen 
(1877), but Lou Andreas-Salome appears to be of the opinion that he 
was none the less indebted to R6e, through conversations had with him 
while the latter was preparing Die Entstehung des Gewissens (op. cit., 
pp. 189-90). Ziegler traces Nietzsche's view back to Leopold Schmidt's 
Ethik der alien Griechen (1882). 

k Welcker (quoted by Grote, History of Greece, II, 419 ff. ) remarks 
that by this time the political or class senses of " good " and " bad " 
had fallen into desuetude. 

1 Riehl argues that a process, which is supposed to be typical, ought 
always to be met with under similar circumstances, and asks, " But 
where among the Greeks is the ' slave-morality ' to be found along with 
their master-morality" (op. cit., p. 119) ? The argument is plausible, but 
slightly wooden, for tendencies may exist even if the conditions are not 
present which allow them to go into effect. Even so, there are not 
wanting signs that something like a " slave-morality " snowed its begin- 
nings in Greece. If what Callicles says in Plato's " Gorgias " relates at 
all to matter of fact, the mass did sometimes endeavor to put through 
their own point of view and make laws and moral distinctions in their 
own interest. This " accomplished Athenian gentleman," as Jowett speaks 
of him — at least a representative of the old order and out of humor with 



506 NOTES 

his time — gives it as his opinion that it is the weaker and more numerous 
mass who are making the laws and making them for their own advantage, 
distributing praise and blame, too, from the standpoints of their own 
interests; they go counter to old ideas of what is just and right and 
will have nothing of the superior privileges of superior men; equality is 
their watchword; for one to have more than others ( to nXeoveKTelv, 
translated, in misleading fashion, "dishonesty" by Jowett) is in their 
eyes shameful and unjust ("Gorgias," pp. 483-4). That Callicles did not 
oppose law, but that kind of law, is indicated by his questioning whether 
what a rabble of slaves and nondescripts, who are of no use except perhaps 
for their physical strength, gather to impose, are laws ( 489 ) . 

m Really the later type of prophets, for the first ones " were probably 
little more than frenzied seers " ( so C. H. Toy, History of the Religion 
of Israel, p. 34 — see e.g., I Samuel xix, 24). 

» " The words anav, sweet, and ani, poor, both springing from the 
same root signifying modest, become in this limited world of a fanatical 
people synonymous. The concepts poor, afflicted, oppressed, mild, re- 
signed, pious are no longer distinguished, and the words which properly 
signify poor (dal, eoion) become equivalent to holy men, friends of God. 
The anavim or hasidim form the elect of humanity; they are the sweet 
of the world, the righteous, the upright, the pious. The Hebrew words 
(asir, gadol, avis) become designations of blame; the rich, the merry, 
the bold mocker (lee) are for the pious objects of the most furious hate" 
(Wilhelm Weigand, Friedrich Nietzsche, ein psychologischer Versuch, pp. 
58-9). 

o Occasionally Christian scholars themselves read between the lines. 
For example, Weinel, after mentioning the fact that Christianity in its 
first period lived among the lower strata of the Roman Empire, says, 
*' We must grant that from many an early Christian writing there speaks 
not the contempt of a higher ideal for what is impure and common, but 
the hate of the oppressed and trampled upon, the persecuted and ex- 
ploited. One need only read the Apocalypse of John or the Epistle of 
James." He adds, however, that this was contrary to the principle and 
word of Jesus {op. cit., p. 179). 

p In Human, etc., § 45, Nietzsche had held that our present morality 
grew up among the ruling races and classes. The later view developed 
in the text is contradictory — we may perhaps say that he came to see 
the present moral situation more distinctly; but the difference may be 
partly owing to the fact that in the passage cited he conceives of the 
subject-classes or races as mere heaps of individuals without fellow- 
feeling, afraid and suspicious of every one. 

CHAPTER XX 

a At the same time Nietzsche remarks that the air of gloom and 
severity usually investing duties may lessen, or even pass away. When 
duty ceases to be hard to us, when after long practice it changes into 
a pleasant inclination and a need, then the rights of others to which 
our duties, now our inclinations, correspond, become something different, 
namely, occasions for agreeable sensations. When the Quietists no longer 
experienced anything oppressive in their Christianity and found only 
pleasure in God, they took for their motto "All for the glory of God": 
whatever they then did it was sacrifice no longer — the motto might equally 
have been " All for our pleasure " ! To demand that duty shall always 
be burdensome (lastig) — as Kant does — means that it shall never become 
habit and custom (Dawn of Day, § 339). 

t>The state, for instance, did not arise in contract, rather in violence, 



NOTES 507 

but its rights come in time to be recognized, and duties to it too (cf. 
Genealogy etc., II, § 17). 

CHAPTER XXI 

a In another passage {Will to Power, §738) he speaks differently, 
" Every power which prohibits and knows how to awaken fear in the 
person whom the prohibition affects, produces ' bad conscience ' ( that is, 
an impulse to something with a consciousness of the dangerousness of 
satisfying it and of the necessity thence of secrecy, by-ways, precaution ) . 
Every prohibition produces a worse character in those who do not willingly 
obey it, but are only forced." But here " bad conscience " is little more 
than fear. 

b The worth of Nietzsche's analysis of the general idea of a moral 
order is sometimes recognized in theological circles. Weinel gives up the 
idea, remarking, " Actually this form of faith in God occupies the whole 
foreground of our religious teaching, so that not only the pastor and the 
religious teacher . . . but also professors of philosophy and of the- 
ology regard it as the Christian conception. And even our l atheists/ 
who no longer believe in God, think that they can still believe in the 
phantom of this ' moral world-order.' But it is a phantom, and Nietzsche 
has recognized it as such rightly, and perhaps with more penetration 
than any one else in our whole generation" (op. tit., p. 197). 

c The idea that there must be wrong somewhere to account for suf- 
fering is given a curious turn by those who charge up their troubles to 
other people and find a certain easement thereby. Nietzsche notes the 
way in which socialists and modern decadents generally hold the upper 
classes or the Jews or the social order or the system of education re- 
sponsible for the state in which they find themselves: they want to fasten 
guilt somewhere ( Will to Power, § 765 ) . One thinks of Matthew Arnold's 
subtle line, 

" With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily." 

d Nietzsche dissents also from the metaphysical manipulation of 
" ought," which makes it a means of reaching a transcendental order of 
things, i.e., " transcendental freedom " in the Kantian and Schopen- 
hauerian sense (Will to Power, §584; Twilight of the Idols, v, §6). 

e It is true that Nietzsche has occasional satirical reflections on the 
impulse to obey; cf., on the Germans, Dawn of Day, §207; Werke, XIII, 
344-5, §855; and, generally, Werke, XI, 214-5, § 141; Joyful Science, §5. 
And there can be no question that the impulse to command ranks higher 
than that -to obey. All the same, he recognizes the organic place of 
obedience in the scheme of things. 

f In what seems a similar spirit John Dewey finds distinctions be- 
tween men vanishing, when their common " birth and destiny in nature " 
is remembered. Democracy appears in his eyes accordingly as " neither 
a form of government nor a social philosophy, but a metaphysic of the 
relation of man and his experience to nature" (Hibbert Journal, July, 
1911, pp. 777-8). This is democracy with a vengeance! 

e Cf . the language to the working-class of an American socialist poet 
(Arthur Giovanitti) : 

" Think, think ! while breaks in you the dawn, 
Crouched at your feet the world lies still, 
It has no power but your brawn, 
It has no wisdom but your will. 

Beyond your flesh and mind and blood, 

Nothing there is to live and do, 
There is no man, there is no God, 

There is not anything but you." 



™g 



508 NOTES 

k In Beyond Good and Evil, § 23, he says that there are a hundred 
good reasons why any one should keep away from his circle of ideas who 
— can ! " We others are the exception and the danger, who never dare 
be the rule" {Joyful Science, § 76; cf. Dawn of Day, §507). Interesting 
in this connection is an enumeration of ways in which antiquity may 
and may not be useful to us now: for example, it is not for young 
people; it is not for direct imitation; it is approachable only for few — 
and morals should comprise some kind of police regulations here, as it 
should also against bad pianists who play Beethoven (Werke, X, 412, 
§273). 

CHAPTER XXII 

a The word " altruism " is called an " Italian hybrid " by a writer 
on Nietzsche in the Quarterly Review (October, 1896, pp. 314-5) ; accord- 
ing to the Grande Encyclopedic, it was invented by Comte. 

t> Cf . Nietzsche's language : " What is done from love is always beyond 
good and evil" {Beyond Good and Evil, § 153) ; "Jesus said to his Jewish 
followers, ' the law was for servants — love God, as I love him, as his son ! 
what is morality to us'! " {ibid., § 164) ; " What is done from love is not 
moral but religious " ( Werke, XII, 289, § 296 ) ; and the description of 
the feeling of Paul and the first Christians, " all morality, all obeying 
and doing, fails to produce the feeling of power and freedom which love 
produces — from love one does nothing bad {Schlimmes) , one does much 
more than one would do from obedience and virtuous principle " ( Will 
to Power, § 176). 

c F. Rittelmeyer, commenting on the fact that Goethe's egoism led 
him to refuse the importunities of strangers, says, " That Goethe could 
have committed no greater crime against humanity than to have sacrificed 
himself to such importunate people, and in this way failed to have pro- 
duced his immortal works, is not thought of" {Friedrich Nietzsche und 
die Religion, p. 93 ) . 

dThis by J. M. Warbeke, Harvard Theological Review, July, 1909, 
p. 368. Cf. Richard Beyer, Nietzsches Versuch einer Umwerthung oiler 
Werthe, p. 21, and even H. Scheffauer, Quarterly Review, July, 1913, 
p. 170. 

e Paul Elmer More thinks that for a right understanding of Nietzsche 
we must find his place in the debate between egotism {sic) and sym- 
pathy, self-interest and benevolence, which has been going on for two 
centuries, and devotes nearly a third of his little book already cited 
(pp. 19-47) to an historical review of the contest as it has been waged 
in England, mentioning Rousseau, Kant, and Schleiermacher briefly at 
the close. But it is a mistake to range Nietzsche baldly on the side of 
egoism against sympathy, self-interest against benevolence; he really 
leaves that wearisome controversy behind. His problem is pity, and pity 
particularly as viewed by Schopenhauer. Curiously enough, the author 
does not even mention Schopenhauer in the connection. In saying the 
above I do not forget that Nietzsche opposed the overemphasis on sym- 
pathy and altruism characteristic of our time. Comte, he remarks, 
" with his celebrated formula vivre pour autrui has in fact outchristian- 
ized Christianity" {Dawn of Day, §132). "Our socialists are decadents, 
but also Mr. Herbert Spencer is a decadent — he sees in the triumph of 
altruism something desirable" {Twilight etc., IX, § 37; cf. Joyful Science, 
§ 373 ) . " We are no humanitarians ; we should never dare allow our- 
selves to speak of our ' love to mankind ' — for this one like us is not 
actor enough or not Saint-Simonist enough, or Frenchman enough! " 
{Joyful Science, § 377). He even regards the modern softening of manners 
as a result of decline, speaking of our " morals of sympathy, which might 



NOTES 509 

be called I'impressionisme morale," as one more expression of the physi- 
ological oversensitiveness, peculiar to everything that is decadent; in con- 
trast, " strong times, superior cultures, see in pity, in ' love of neighbors/ 
in deficiency of personality and self -feeling, something despicable " ( Twi- 
light etc., ix, § 37 ) . All this, however, does not mean that Nietzsche 
failed to recognize the due place of sympathy and altruism in normal 
social life. 

fHans B61art remarks that when Nietzsche criticises morality and 
comes to the conclusion that it is the danger of dangers, we must remem- 
ber that it was above all the morality of his great teacher Schopenhauer 
which he had in mind — a morality that emphasized the impulses of self- 
denial and self-sacrifice, and so gilded them and deified them and made 
metaphysical use of them (verjenseitigt) , that they became absolute 
values, from the standpoint of which he turned against life and even 
himself. Further, as Nietzsche viewed matters, this doctrine of denial 
and asceticism was closely interwoven with Christianity, and it was on 
this account that he turned against Christianity (Nietzsches Metaphysik, 
pp. 1-3). The antithesis of morality — this type of morality — to life might 
be stated as follows: in the last analysis life lives off other life, but 
morality leads us to identify ourselves with other life; so far then as we 
do this, the will to assert ourselves on our own account tends to vanish — 
with a complete identification the basis of individual existence would 
disappear. 

g So Carl Lory, Nietzsche als Geschichtsphilosoph, p. 22. Nietzsche 
had said in " Richard Wagner in Bayreuth " ( sect. 5 ) that one could not 
be happy with suffering everywhere about one. This and the first three 
citations in the text belong to the first period of his life, but as they 
are only in keeping with later utterances, it seems allowable to use them 
here. 

kThis to von Gersdorff, May 26, 1876 (Brief e, I, 379). He wrote to 
Malwida von Meysenbug, March 24, 1875, " I have wished that I could 
daily do some good thing to others. This autumn I proposed to myself 
to begin each morning by asking, Is there no one to whom thou couldst 
do some good today? ... I vex too many men by my writings, not to 
feel obliged to attempt to make it up to them somehow" (quoted in 
Meyer's Nietzsche, p. 666). 

i In " The Use and Harm of History," sect. 2, those who pass through 
life " pitiful and helpful " are spoken of with honor, as well as other 
types. Soft, benevolent, pitiful feelings are classed among the good 
things once counted bad (schlimme) things in Genealogy etc., Ill, §9. 
In Dawn of Day, § 136, pity is even recognized as a self-preservative power 
for certain individuals (e.g., those Hindus who find the aim of all intel- 
lectual activity in coming to know human misery) since it takes them 
away from themselves, banishes fear and numbness (Erstarrung), and 
incites to words and actions. 

3 Nietzsche recognizes that this is its normal character. " With alms 
one maintains the situation that makes the motive to alms. One gives 
then not from pity, for this would not wish to continue the situation " 
(Werke, XI, 227, §172 — italics mine). Dewey and Tufts are hardly 
right in suggesting that Nietzsche overlooks " the reaction of sympathy 
to abolish the source of suffering" (op. cit., p. 370 n). 

k Weinel makes the following admission: "Let us ask ourselves if 
we wish to be pitied by others, if we find an attitude of this sort toward 
us pleasing? . . . Even if Nietzsche's course in following up the most 
secret feelings of one who pities is dictated by suspicion, and his thought 
or scent takes him too far, it is still true that the noblest type of soul 
cannot show pity without feeling some kind of superiority and placing 
himself over against the other as the giving party" (op. cit., pp. 172-3). 



510 NOTES 

i Sometimes he makes distinctions on the subject. " ' On n'est ton que 
par la pitie: il faut done qu'il y ait quelque pitie dans tous nos senti- 
ments ' — so sounds morality at present ! And how has this come about ? — 
That the man of sympathetic, disinterested, publicly useful, gregarious 
actions is now felt to be the moral man, is perhaps the most general effect 
and change of mind which Christianity has produced in Europe; although 
it was neither its intention nor its doctrine" (Dawn of Day, 132 — the 
italics are mine). 

m So a writer whom Dolson quotes (op. cit., p. 100). The Encyclo- 
pedia Britannica, art. " Ethics," calls Nietzsche " the most orthodox ex- 
ponent of Darwinian ideas in their application to ethics." It seems to 
be the general view, even Frank Thilly saying, " Nietzsche made this 
theory the basis of his new ethics" (Philosophical Review, March, 1916, 
p. 190). 

»Cf., e.g., Will to Power, §§70, 647-52, 684, 685; Twilight etc., ix, 
§ 14. One who wishes a discriminating treatment of the subject cannot 
do better than read pp. 219-38 of Richter's Friedrich Nietzsche. Simmel, 
in " Fr. Nietzsche, eine moralphilosophische Silhouette " ( Zeitschrift fiir 
Philosophic, 1906), and Oskar Ewald in Nietzsches Lehre in ihren Grund- 
oegriffen, deny specifically Darwinian elements in the theory of the 
superman, though SimmePs view appears to be somewhat modified in his 
Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (1907 — see p. 5). 

oThe loftier elevation, where pity is transcended, is portrayed in 
these lines: 

" Destined, O star, for radiant path, 
No claim on thee the darkness hath! 
Roll on in bliss through this, our age! 
Its trouble ne'er shall thee engage! 
In furthest worlds thy beams shall glow: 
Pity, as sin, thou must not know! 
Be pure: that duty's all you owe." 

The transation is Thomas Common's — the original, with the title, 
" Stemen-Moral," being § 63 of " Scherz, List und Rache," prefixed to 
Joyful Science. Similar sentiment is expressed in Beyond Good and Evil, 
§§271, 284; Will to Power, §985. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

j* Vernon Lee says in Vital Lies, " Make no use of ' vital lies,' they are 
vital' and useful only when they are accepted as vital truths " — as if 
being " accepted as vital truths " was inconsistent with their being 
"lies"! 

kPaul Carus does not interpret Nietzsche's attitude to truth and 
science very finely when he says that " he expressed the most sovereign 
contempt for science," was " too proud to submit to anything, even to 
truth," or " to recognize the duty of inquiring," and rejected " with dis- 
dain " the "methods of the intellect" (Nietzsche and Other Exponents of 
Individualism, pp. 5-8). 

cEven Dolson (op. cit., p. 96), but not William Wallace (op. cit., 
pp. 533-4), who, however, hardly does justice to the full import of Nietz- 
sche's skepticism. 

d Cf . Richter's lucid statement : " In the realms of values there are 
no true and no false ideas, in the time-honored sense of agreement or 
disagreement of an idea with its object. For there are here no objects, 
known as existing, but only something not existing in advance, namely, 
goals or ends (Ziele) which are arbitrarily created by an act of will. 



NOTES 511 

And for this creative act there is in turn no other regulative than the 
individual will" (op. cit., p. 211). 

©The high place which Nietzsche gives to justice appears notably in 
Genealogy etc., II, §1; Will to Power, §967; Werke, XIV, 80, §158. 
He admits, indeed, that we can hardly be just to ideals which are 
different from our own (cf. Werke, XII, 136, § 263), and that there is a 
natural antinomy, even in a philosopher, between strong love and hate 
and justice or fairness (Will to Power, § 976). 



CHAPTER XXIV 

a Zarathustra says ( II, ii ) , " If there were Gods, how could I endure 
to be no God ? " It is easy to scoff at such a saying, but if we go beneath 
the surface, we see that it is only an extravagant way of expressing the 
deeply-felt obligation to be like God which is at the root of the saying 
of Jesus. See the illuminating remarks of Simmel, op. cit., pp. 204-5. 

t> Cf . the early statement in " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 6, 
beginning, " I see something higher and more human above me than I 
myself am" (quoted in full on p. 61). In a way the impulse rested on 
a need — a pressing need in his case, familiar with the tragic view of 
things as he was — the need of something joy-producing : " Love to men ? 
But I say, Joy in men! and that this may not be irrational, we must 
help produce what will give joy " — hence select, seek out, and further those 
who do, or may, and let the misshapen and degenerate die out ( Werke, XI, 
247-8, §213). 

c No one has developed this general view with greater thoroughness 
than Edmund Montgomery (see his Philosophical Problems in the Light 
of Vital Organization, and numerous articles in Mind and The Monist ) . 
Montgomery writes as a biologist, with at the same time the broader 
outlook and the penetration of the philosopher. 

d See the general line of considerations in Werke, XIII, 181, § 412. 
Dolson says that the existence of the altruistic instincts was " admitted," 
but " deplored " by Nietzsche — " one must conquer them " (op. cit., p. 100) . 
This, as a broad statement, is distinctly a mistake. Altruism is only 
deplored when exercised in a certain way. She is also mistaken in saying 
that the higher man in sacrificing himself sacrifices " only that side of 
his nature that finds expression in self-sacrifice" (p. 101) — he may 
sacrifice himself altogether, giving up his life. 

e Cf . A. W. Benn, International Journal of Ethics, October, 1908, pp. 
19-21. But when Benn suggests that Nietzsche was prevented from ac- 
cepting utilitarianism by the pervading skeptical and negative cast of his 
intellect, aggravated by the use of drugs and solitary habits, he is hardly 
sagacious. 

f For Nietzsche's various and varying views of pleasure and happi- 
ness, cf. Werke, XI, 219, §153; XIV, 88, §177; Will to Power, §260 
(where the point is that happiness may be reached in opposite ways, 
and hence is no basis for ethics) ; Zarathustra, prologue, § 5 (a description 
of the happiness of a degenerate type of man); Dawn of Day, §339; 
Werke, XII, 148, §295; Will to Power, §260 (habit, necessity, and our 
own valuations of things factors in determining pleasure and pain) ; 
Werke, XIII, 208-9, §477 (happiness as distinguished from enjoyment, 
Genuss) ; Dawn of Day, § 108 (the happiness of different stages of de- 
velopment incomparable with one another, being neither higher nor lower, 
but simply peculiar). 

g H. Goebel and E. Antrim do not take this into account when they 
speak (among other things) of the "right of the individual to obey abso- 
lutely all the instincts and impulses of his nature," as " Nietzscheanism " 



512 NOTES 

(Monist, July, 1899, p. 571). Nietzsche also expresses himself in this 
way: "The opposite of the heroic ideal is the ideal of all-round develop- 
ment — and a beautiful opposite and one very desirable, but only an ideal 
for men good from the bottom up (e.g., Goethe)." This was written for 
Lou Andreas-Salome, and is quoted by her (op. cit., p. 25). 

h Cf . in this connection the striking remarks on the modern educated 
man, even including Goethe (after all " kein Olympier" !) in Will to Poicer, 
§ 883; cf. 881. Nietzsche's thought is that while the great men must 
have many sides and a variety of powers, these must all be yoked together 
in the service of a supreme aim. See also the comments in " Schopen- 
hauer as Educator," sect. 2, on two contrasted ideals of education. 

1 A similar shade of antithetical meaning appears in what Zara- 
thustra says to the higher men who come to him, " Better despair than 
surrender [i.e., to the small people with small virtues and policies, who 
are lords of today]. And truly I love you, because you know not how 
to live today. So do you live — best! " (Zarathustra, IV, xii, § 3) . Heinrich 
Scharren puts the distinction in this way : " Not life as existence in 
general is the supreme value to Nietzsche, but life as will to power" 
(Nietzsches Stellung zum Euddmonismus, p. 47). 

JDorner {op. cit., p. 152) calls it a contradiction to turn a pure 
principle of nature into a principle of value. Valuing is indeed a distinct 
act of the mind, and an end as such has no independent existence, being 
wholly relative to the mind and will that set it, but why may not the 
mind give supreme value to something actually existing (or developing) ? 

k Cf . a general critical reflection : " Individualism is a modest and 
as yet unconscious sort of 'will to power'; the individual thinks it 
enough to liberate himself from the superior power of society (whether 
state or church). He puts himself in opposition not as person, but 
purely as individual; he stands for individuals iD general as against the 
collectivity. This means that instinctively he puts himself on the same 
plane with every individual; what he contends for, he contends for not 
on behalf of himself as a person, but as the representative of individuals 
against the whole " ( Will to Power, § 784 ) . What Nietzsche means by 
" persons " will appear later. 

iSee Simmel, op. cit., pp. 233-4; cf. p. 245 ("That this doctrine 
should be taken for a frivolous egoism, a sanctioning of Epicurean un- 
bridledness, belongs to the most astonishing illusions in the history of 
morals " — the illusion is shared in striking manner by Paul Carus, op. 
cit., pp. 34, 61, 104, 138). So G. A. Tienes, "No ordinary egoist can 
appeal to Nietzsche with even an appearance of right" (Nietzsches 
Stellung zu den Grundfragen der Ethik genetisch dargestellt, p. 30 ) . 
Ernst Horneffer also has discriminating remarks on the subject, Vortrdge 
iiber Nietzsche, pp. 80-1; and Carl Lory, Nietzsche als Geschichts- 
philosoph, p. 22. As to Stirner, see Richter, op. cit., pp. 345-7; Riehl, 
op. cit., p. 86; Meyer, op. cit., pp. 89-90; Dolson, op. cit., p. 95; Ziegler, 
op. cit., pp. 154, }57; R. H. Griitzmacher, op. cit., p. 170. A special lit- 
erature has arisen as to the relation of Stirner to Nietzsche — cf. Robert 
Schellwein, Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche (1892) ; A. Levy, Stirner 
et Nietzsche (Paris, 1904). It appears doubtful whether Nietzsche had 
read Stirner's book (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum) ; if he had, its 
influence upon him is inappreciable. Of the Greek Sophists it may be 
said that Nietzsche unquestionably has points of view in common with 
them (see his own comment on them, Will to Power, §§428-9), but this 
should not obscure for us the differences. A convenient book for the study 
of Nietzsche's relation to the early Greek thinkers in general, the Sophists 
included, is Richard Oehler's Nietzsche und die Vorsokratiker. I may also 
mention Max Wiesenthal, Friedrich Nietzsche und die griechische Sophistik, 
and Benedict Lachmann, Protagoras, Nietzsche, Stirner. 



NOTES 513 

Unquestionably the best general treatment of Nietzsche's positive 
ethics thus far is Richter's, op. cit., pp. 199-268 (see particularly pp. 210 ff., 
239 ff.). 

CHAPTER XXV 

aCf., for example, "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," sect. 11 ("Who 
of you is ready to renounce power, knowing and feeling that power is 
evil"?); sect. 8 (reflections on Wagner's own early temptation to seek 
for " power and glory " ) ; Human, etc., § 588 ( " We hate the arrogance of 
the great man, not so far as he feels his power, but because he wants to 
feel it only in injuring others, domineering over them and seeing how 
far they will stand it") ; ibid., §261 (on the pride and tyrannical tend- 
encies of the early Greek philosophers ) . 

*>A more pertinent incident in this connection is mentioned by his 
sister, namely the feeling aroused in him as he witnessed a train of 
German cavalry, artillery, and infantry advancing to the front during the 
Franco-Prussian war. He was deeply stirred, and many years afterward 
said to his sister, " I felt that the strongest and highest will to life does 
not come to expression in a pitiful struggle for existence, but as a will 
for combat, a will for power and supremacy" (Werke, pocket ed., IX, 
xi). Cf. the comments on the incident by Miss Hamblen (op. cit., pp. 
46-7), who, however, appears to me to exaggerate in speaking of the 
doctrine as a " revelation " or " intuition." 

cit is true that a different idea of nature as involving order and law 
appears in Beyond Good and Evil, § 188. There is also an early sugges- 
tion ("David Strauss etc.," sect. 7) of the possibility of developing an 
ethics along the lines of Darwin's conception of nature, where the strong 
have the mastery (a suggestion which Nietzsche is popularly supposed to 
have carried out eventually himself — on this point, see pp. 310, 401, 437). 
In quite another sense, the highest type of man is once spoken of as a 
copy of nature, namely in the prodigality with which he overflows, exer- 
cising much reason in details, but prodigal as a whole and indifferent to 
consequences (Werke, XIV, 335, § 178; cf. Twilight etc., ix, §44). 

a The articles appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, that of James in 
the number for October, 1880. The latter is reproduced in The Will to 
Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (pp. 216-54). 

eRiehl criticises: "This monotonous power! more power! Power 
over what, we ask, and above all, power for what?" (op. cit., p. 124). 
Would he say the same of " life " ? Is it monotonous, save to the weary, 
to speak of life, and more life? Would one ask of life, "for what"? Has 
it a purpose beyond itself and its own utmost development? Yet to Nietz- 
sche power and will to it are the concrete and foundation meaning of life. 
I may add that as power, or will to power is to Nietzsche the ultimate 
reality of things, it has no origin (Will to Power, §690), and can have 
no outside legitimation (cf. Werke, XI, 20, §114; XII, 207, §441; XIII, 
198, §436; VII, pocket ed., 485, §34). 

f Cf . Emerson to the effect that power is rarely found in the right 
state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the supersaturation or 
excess which makes it dangerous and destructive, and yet that it cannot 
be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take 
off its edge ("Power," in Conduct of Life). 

gThat Nietzsche himself felt the difficulty keenly is shown in Will 
to Power, §685; cf. Werke, XIV, 218, §440. F. C. S. Schiller, in com- 
menting on a similar passage (Will to Power, §864), says, "The candor 
of the admission that the ' strong ' are in reality the weaker, does not 
seem to leave much substance in Nietzsche's advocacy of the strong-man 
doctrine" (Quarterly Review, January, 1913, p. 157). 



514 NOTES 

h The paradox that the weak in combination, by making laws against 
the strong, prove themselves the stronger, plays its part in the argument 
of Socrates against Callicles in Plato's " Gorgias " (488). One feels in 
reading the dialogue that Socrates is the greater dialectician, but that 
it is chiefly a verbal victory which he wins over Callicles, who really has 
in mind a strong type of man, yet is not able to express himself clearly and 
perhaps has not thought out his meaning anyway. 

i Richter remarks on the vagueness of the concept (op. cit., p. 325) ; 
cf. Fouillee, Nietzsche et VImmoralisme, II, chap, i, and F. C. S. Schiller, 
Quarterly Review, January, 1915, p. 157 ("He never unambiguously ex- 
plains what he means by ' strength ' and seems to have no consistent 
notion of it " ) . But is not the vagueness of the concept partly owing to 
the fact that, like all abstractions, it gets its real meaning in concrete 
instances, and a more or less varied meaning as the instances differ? 

i So far as he attempts an explanation of the world in terms of will 
(or wills) to power, it is only, to use a happy expression of Richter's, a 
metaphysics of the first degree; what the real and ultimate nature of 
power (and will to it) is, he leaves undetermined, perhaps viewing it as 
an unnecessary question. 

k Not that the possibilities of progress are infinite. The total amount 
of force, energy, or power (they are equivalent expressions to Nietzsche) 
in the world, however great, is limited, and the combinations it can 
make and the heights it can attain, however far beyond anything we 
know now, have their limits too. When then the end is reached, power 
can only turn on itself, dissolve the fabrics it has made, and allow the 
play to begin again (cf. Will to Power, § 712; Zarathustra, III, xiii, § 2; 
Joyful Science, §111). It is Heraclitus' iEon, or the great "world- 
child Zeus," 7raif naifav over again (cf. "Philosophy in the Tragic 
Period of the Greeks," sects. 7, 8; Will to Power, § 797). 

i As to the inner mechanics of the evolution of higher sorts of power 
from lower, I am not able to make out a clear consistent view in Nietz- 
sche. He sometimes speaks as if the higher powers seized on the lower 
and subjugated them, being presumably then independent existences 
themselves (the kinship being only that all are alike forms of power) ; 
and yet he generally uses the language of strict evolution. Perhaps, 
even if there are eternally different kinds of power, this is not incon- 
sistent with the higher being spiritualizations of the lower, rather than 
of a different substance. 

mMind, for instance, may have its ascendancy over matter, just 
because it is a spiritualization of the same energy that is in matter (this 
aside from the fact that matter may be itself only statable ultimately in 
energetic terms ) . 

n It can only be said in charity that even those " who know " cannot 
in this age of the world be expected to know everything, especially when 
the subject is so strange and multiform a thinker as Nietzsche. I give 
only a few of the many instances of hasty judgment: — The superman 
" will strive to become like the ' blonde Bestie ' of the old German forests, 
etc." (J. M. Warbeke, Harvard Theological Review, July, 1909, p. 373) ; 
Nietzsche's speculations, " if ever they come to be acted upon, would 
dissolve society as we understand it and bring us back to the ' dragons 
of the prime'" (Bennett Hume, London Quarterly Review, October, 1900, 
p. 338); "'We have now at last,' says Nietzsche, 'arrived at the brink 
of the period when wickedness shall prevail again, as it did in the good 
old heroic times when the strong man scalped, and stole, and lied, and 
cheated, and abducted ' " ( Oswald Crauf ord, Nineteenth Century, October, 
1900, p. 604) ; " One must . . . get back once more to a primitive natural- 
ness in which man is a magnificent blond beast, etc." (H. T. Peck, 
Bookman, September, 1898, p. 30); "imagined as Nietzsche describes 



NOTES 515 

him, he [the Ubermensch] reels back into the beast" (Encyclopedia 
Britannica, art. " Ethics " ) . So A. S. Pringle Pattison speaks of this 
" wild beast theory of ethics," and finds Nietzsche's message to be " Back 
therefore to instinct, to 'the original text' of man" (Man's Place in the 
Cosmos, 2d ed., p. 317). C. C. Everett, rarum nomen among American 
philosophical writers, who indeed expresses his perfect agreement with 
Nietzsche's doctrine that the desire of power is the fundamental element 
of life, the only question being what kind of a self is asserted, finds 
Nietzsche's point of view practically " identical with that of a robber- 
baron of the Middle Ages" (Essays Theological and Literary, pp. 124-9). 
G. Lowes Dickinson, in commenting on Nietzsche's view that power is 
the only thing that man will care to pursue, says that a man who has 
a right to such opinions would in our society become a great criminal, 
an active revolutionary, or an anarchist (Justice and Liberty, pp. 14-19) 
— a dictum the stranger, since the author himself says later, " Moral 
force in the end is the only force" (p. 217). 

o Riehl says, " The already proverbial ' blond beast ' is not an ideal 
of Nietzsche's, but his symbol for man as he was before culture was 
developed, the man of nature — his symbol for a pre-historic, pre-moral 
fact, and what appeared so attractive to him was the still unbroken 
force of nature there, not its bestiality" (op. cit., p. 159) — a statement 
which only needs correction in so far as Nietzsche had in mind not 
primitive man in general, but the primitive Aryans. See also Berthelot's 
article, "Nietzsche," in the Grande Encyclopedic (a notable contrast to 
the meager misleading article under the same heading in the Encyclo- 
pedia Britannica). Thilly remarks, "He [Nietzsche] does not wish to 
bring back the ' blond beast ' of early times " ( Popular Science Monthly, 
December, 1905, p. .721). 

p " Manners," in Society and Solitude. Of a similar temper is the 
remark (in connection with certain political agitations before our Civil 
War ) : "If it be only a question between the most civil and the most 
forcible, I lean to the last. These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better 
than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a bold and 
manly sort." 

Q Meyer, while speaking of it as remarkable that the "blond beast," 
who is this and nothing more, is wanting among the " higher men," 
whose hypertrophy of single traits is portrayed in the Fourth Part of 
Zarathustra, adds that after all it is not remarkable, since he is really 
no higher man, but only the condition or presupposition (Vorbedingung) 
of one (op. cit., p. 435). What in part misleads the reader is the ap- 
parent gusto with which Nietzsche describes the violence of the " blond 
beast " in the first of the two passages cited in the text. In a similar 
way Weinel charges Nietzsche with a thirst for blood, or at least with 
championing an impulse of that sort, because he portrays with astonish- 
ing and, for the moment, sympathetic penetration the psychology of the 
"pale criminal" (op. cit., p. 183; cf. Zarathustra, I, vi). But Nietzsche 
almost always becomes a part (for the time) of that which he describes — 
that is, he tries to take an inside view of it. Actually, however, ordinary 
deeds of blood were as repulsive to him as to any one, and he counsels 
no uncertain methods in dealing with them — his views of civil punish- 
ment really deserve special treatment. 

r The following are some of the trying passages : Zarathustra, III, 
xii, 4, " A right which thou canst seize upon, thou shalt not allow to be 
given thee." Of this it can only be said that Zarathustra is here speaking 
to his disciples, who are to take his ideal from the mountain-top down into 
the world, and that truth and moral commandments and the right to 
rule do not necessarily rest upon the general assent. Will to Power, 
§§ 735, 736, the tenor of which is that the weak and sickly may have 



516 NOTES 

their one moment of strength in a crime and that this may be a justifica- 
tion of their existence; also, that the really great in history have been 
criminals, breaking, as they had need, with, custom, conscience, duty — 
knowing the danger of it, yet willing the great end and therefore the 
means (cf. also Werke, XIV, 78, §153). As to the first point (cf. also 
WerJce, XI, 250, §216), the view is not unlike Browning's in "The 
Statue and the Bust": 

" I hear your approach — ' But delay was best 

For their end was a crime.' — Oh, a crime will do 
As well, I reply, to serve for a test, 

As a virtue golden through and through." 

(Cf. also Nietzsche's reference to Dostoiewsky's testimony as to the 
strong characters he met with in prison, Will to Power, § 233 ) . In 
judging the second point, it may not be beside the mark to say that 
" crime " is a legal category, that " conscience " is a psychological phe- 
nomenon not necessarily squaring with the truth of things, that " duty " 
means felt duty, which may not be what one really ought to do (sup- 
posing that there is any objective standard) — does not the Talmud say 
that there is "a time to serve the Lord by breaking his commandments?" 
Beyond Good and Evil, § 158, " To our strongest impulse, the tyrant 
within us, not only our reason subjects itself, but also our conscience; " 
also Werke, XIII, p. 209, § 482, " No one is held in check by principles." 
These are primarily statements of fact, and the truth of them is a 
question for psychologists. It may be said, however, that the last state- 
ment cannot possibly mean that man's thoughts, his general principles, 
may not influence his conduct, Nietzsche giving too many instances of 
a contrary view (cf. Werke, XII, 64, § 117, quoted ante, p. 175). What 
perhaps, Nietzsche really had in mind was that " principles," taken 
abstractly and out of relation to the psychological driving forces, are 
ineffectual — somewhat as Fichte said, " Man can only will what he 
loves," or as J. R. Seeley spoke of the expulsive power of a new affection. 
Will to Power, § 788, " to give back to the bosen man good conscience — 
has this been my involuntary concern? and indeed to the bosen man, so 
far as he is the strong man " ? This is perhaps the most shocking 
passage to the ordinary reader, but hardly to one acquainted with Nietz- 
sche's thought and use of language. The hose man is one who is bent 
on injury or destruction and inspires fear; such men are necessary to 
the world's progress, in Nietzsche's estimation — both malevolent and 
benevolent impulses having their part to play. Nietzsche has no wish 
to give good conscience to the bad {schlechten) man. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

a The problem is, of course, highly accentuated for Christianity, since 
to it Almighty Power has made man, and might apparently have given 
equal energy to all. 

*>This does not mean that historical conditions determine them, but 
simply make them possible. Against the former view Nietzsche strongly 
protests — see ante, p. 355, and Nietzsche's Werke, XII, 189-3, §412; 
XIV, 215-6; Twilight etc., ix, §44. According to Wilhelm Ostwald, many 
more potential great men are born than actually become so {Grosse 
Manner, p. iii ) . 

cCf. D. G. Mason's remarks about Beethoven: "He was wilful; but 
it was the wilfulness of a man who knew that he had a great work to 
do and that he understood how to do it better than any one else" {ABC 



NOTES 517 

Guide to Music, p. 127 ) . When some one told Beethoven that a certain 
harmony in one of his pieces was " not allowed," he answered, " Very- 
well, then / allow it" {ibid., p. 127). 

d A somewhat similar point of view appears to be taken by Frank 
Granger in his Historical Sociology. Nietzsche remarks that in seeking 
to determine the end of man we are apt to consider him generically, 
leaving individuals and their peculiarities out of account — but he asks, 
may not each individual be regarded as an attempt to reach a higher 
genus than men, in virtue of his most individual qualities? (Werke, XI, 
238, § 194). 

e The prevailing functional view of man finds expression in F. H. 
Bradley's Ethical Studies, " We have found ourselves, when we have 
found our station and its duties, our function as an organ in the social 
organism" (p. 148). Bradley even says, "To wish to be better than 
the world is already to be on the threshold of immorality"; further, 
" We should consider whether the encouraging oneself in having opinions 
of one's own, in the sense of thinking differently from the world on moral 
subjects, be not, in any person other than a heaven-born prophet, sheer 
self-conceit" (p. 180 f. ). This is sufficiently strong. 

f From this high point of view, " a man as he ought to be " sounds 
as absurd to Nietzsche as a " tree as it ought to be " ( Will to Power, 
§334). Cf. Emerson: "Those who by eminence of nature are out of 
reach of your rewards, let such be free of the city and above the law. 
We confide them to themselves; let them do with us as they will. Let 
none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo and 
Socrates by village scales" ("Plato," in Representative Men). Inter- 
esting to note in this connection is the peculiar way in which Nietzsche 
takes up the early Greek philosophers — his effort being to bring out 
what in each system is a piece of personality and hence belongs to the 
"irrefutable and undiscussable " (preface to "Philosophy in the Tragic 
Period of the Greeks," Werke, IX, 5-6 ) . 

e Cf . the striking description of Sigismondo Castromediano, Duke of 
Marciano, in G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi and the Thousand, pp. 55-6; 
and a saying of Maxim Gorky's, "Nothing is so deadly to the soul as 
the desire to please people." 

k In this connection, another " hard saying " may be mentioned : " A 
great man: one who feels that he has a right to sacrifice men as a field- 
marshal does — not in the service of an ' idea,' but because he will rule " 
(Werke, XIV, 65-6, §130). If a feeling of this kind can anywise be 
justified, it is only as we remember that, to Nietzsche, the great man is 
himself the highest idea — the supreme values being not outside him, but 
incorporated in him (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 199). A kindred "hard 
saying " is, " Do you say, it is the good cause that sanctifies war ? I 
say to you, it is good war that sanctifies every cause " ( Zarathustra, 
I, x). The thought is plainly that putting forth supreme energy is itself 
the greatest good. "'What is good?' you ask. To be brave is good. Let 
little maidens say, 'Good is what is pretty and moving'" {ibid., I, x). 

1 One thinks of Marc Antony's relations with Cleopatra, in contrast 
with those of a really great man, Csesar. 

JTo this side of Nietzsche's view Berthelot hardly does justice in 
his admirable critical study, Un romantisme utilitaire (Vol. 1). 

k Ecce Homo, III, vii, § 2. In America, " gentleman " has become 
little more than a synonym for a certain refinement of manners, chiefly 
of the mild and altruistic sort. Emerson has the old strong conception 
when he says, " God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the 
door; but whenever used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the name 
will be found to point at original energy. . . . The famous gentlemen 
of Asia and Europe have been of this strong type; Saladin, Sapor, the 



518 NOTES 

Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest per- 
sonages " (Essay on "Manners"). 

1 It is a curious reflection on the state of culture in America that 
scholars as well as others sometimes take these magnates as exemplifica- 
tions of Nietzsche's "superman" (cf. Wilbur M. Urban, Atlantic Monthly, 
December, 1912, p. 789). 



CHAPTER XXVII 

a Meyer (op. cit., p. 451 ff.) raises the question whether by superman 
Nietzsche had in mind individuals or a collectivity. In a sense one might 
answer, both: his primary thought was of a certain type of man, irre- 
spective of whether there were one or many of them. Yet however many, 
they would be more or less independent of one another: a compact society 
(Heerde) of supermen is inconceivable ( self -contradictory ) . 

b Theobald Ziegler, of Strasburg, remarks with a certain complacency 
that he was the first professor of philosophy to take up Nietzsche in a 
Seminar, and that his students, all Nietzsche-worshipers at the beginning, 
were at the end Nietzschean no more (Der Turnhahn, June, 1914, p. 643). 
But it may be questioned whether average university students are capable 
of really grasping Nietzsche, so that accepting or rejecting him means 
little in their case. He is for those who have philosophical training and 
ripe powers of reflection to start with — for men (in every sense of the 
word ) . 

c Werke, XIII, 347, § 859. Luther, Niebuhr, Bismarck are given as 
instances. Cf., on a healthy peasant, rude, shrewd, stubborn, enduring, 
as the superior type, Zarathustra, IV, iii; also, on the possibility that 
there is today among the people, and particularly among peasants, more 
relative superiority of taste and tact for reverence than among the 
newspaper-reading half -world of intellect, the educated (Beyond Good and 
Evil, §263). 

dCf. Werke, XII, 410; 368, §718; XIV, 263, §10. In speaking of 
aristocracy, Nietzsche says that he has not in mind the prefix " von " 
and the Qotha Calendar — an intercalation for the benefit of " Esel " ( Will 
to Power, §942). None the less, he holds that aristocracies in general 
are a fruit of time and training (Joyful Science, §40; Beyond Good and 
Evil, §213); and Ziegler thinks that in admitting this, he becomes 
reactionary and plays into the hands of the Junker (Friedrich Nietzsche, 
p. 144) — but surely one may admit the potency of descent and yet allow 
that the family-process may have a beginning and alas! a degenerate 
ending. 

e As to the carelessness of men of genius in marrying, see what 
immediately follows the passage from Zarathustra quoted in the text; 
also Werke, XI, 131, §418; Dawn of Day, §§150-1. The plaint is as old 
as Theognis that while with horses and asses and goats the attempt is 
made to perfect the breed, in the case of man marriage for money spoils 
the race. 

f There is even a late utterance of Nietzsche apologizing for national- 
ism, so far as it is a means of preserving the fighting spirit and con- 
tinuing the strong type of man ( Will to Power, § 729 ; cf . Werke, XIII, 
358, § 882). 

CHAPTER XXVIII 

a One of the first American publicists to see the natural connection 
of democracy with an advanced labor-program (if not socialism) was 
Wayne MacVeagh (see his article "Democracy and Law," New Eng- 



NOTES 519 

lander, January, 1887). I may add that the democracy that marks itself 
off from socialism is apt to be the theory of strong, self-sufficient indi- 
viduals, as against the natural tendency of the mass, who only become 
strong by combination and organization. 

b Nietzsche admits that socialists may deceive themselves about this, 
and may even, to put through their ideas, deceive others — the preaching 
of altruism in the ultimate interest of individual egoism being one of 
the commonest falsifications of the nineteenth century. Cf. the searching 
essay of Bernard Bosanquet, " The Antithesis between Individualism and 
Socialism, philosophically considered," in The Civilization of Christendom. 
In another passage ( Will to Power, § 757 ) , Nietzsche says that modern 
socialism will in the end produce a secular counterpart of Jesuitism — 
every man becoming a tool and nothing else, and he adds, " for what purpose 
is not yet discovered " [he means, of course, " for what rational purpose," 
since making oneself a tool for an organization that simply protects the 
tools hardly rises to that dignity] ; cf ., on this point, the close of 
Chapter XI of this book. 

CHAPTER XXIX 

a In Beyond Good and Evil, § 219, an order of rank is spoken of even 
among things, and not merely among men, and there is a Rangordnung 
of spiritual states (ibid., 257; cf., however, the reservation in Will to 
Power/ § 931), of problems (Beyond Good and Evil, §213), of values 
(Will to Power, § 1006), of moralities (Beyond Good and Evil, §228) — 
not to speak of the fact that a morality of any kind involves a Rang- 
ordnung, something commanding on one side and something obeying on 
the other (Werke, XIII, 105, §246). 

t>The "Law of Manu" contemplated four classes, the priestly, mili- 
tary and political, commercial and agricultural, and a serving-class 
(Sudras) — see Twilight etc., vii, § 3, and the extended notes on the "Law 
of Manu," Werke, XIV, 117-30 (cf. 246-7). In one of his classifications 
(Werke, XII, 411), Nietzsche himself distinguishes a special slave-class, 
though according to his prevailing view the third class themselves have 
the general slave-characteristics. It should be added that the Hindu 
priestly class corresponds in a general way to Nietzsche's first class; he 
particularly notes that the Brahmans named kings, though standing apart 
from political life themselves (Beyond Good and Evil, §61). 

c The upper caste in India was priestly, as noted above, and we under- 
stand how Nietzsche could refer to " the ruling class of priests, nobles, 
thinkers [indifferently] in earlier times" (Werke, XI, 374). Zarathustra, 
after berating priests and calling them enemies, says, " but my blood is 
related to theirs, and I wish withal to have it honored in theirs" (Zara- 
thustra, II, iv ) . 

d Cf. the general saying, " To execute what is great is difficult, but 
more difficult still is to command what is great" (Zarathustra, II, xxii). 
I recall an inscription on the gravestone of Schnorr von Carol sf eld in 
Mariathal, near Brixlegg, in Austria: quo altior gradus eo difiicilius 
officium. 

e Beyond Good and Evil, §29. I give the whole passage: "It is 
something for the fewest to be independent — it is a privilege for the 
strong. And he who attempts it even with the best right, but without 
being compelled, proves that he is probably not only strong, but audacious 
to the point of wantonness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies 
a thousandfold the dangers that life of itself brings in its train; of 
these not the least is that no one sees how and where he loses his way, 
becomes isolated and torn to pieces by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. 
Supposing that he goes to ruin, it happens so far from the understanding 



520 NOTES 

of men that they have no feeling or sympathy for him — and he cannot 
go back any more, he cannot even go back to men's sympathy any more " ! 
Cf. a passage quoted by Meyer (op. cit., p. 587), which I cannot locate: 
" How much of truth one can bear without degenerating, is his [the 
philosopher's] measure. Just so, how much happiness — just so, how much 
freedom and power! " 

' Beyond Good and Evil, §41. I quote practically the whole of this 
passage : " We must give proofs to ourselves that we are fitted for inde- 
pendence and command; and this in season. We must not avoid our 
tests, though they are perhaps the most dangerous game we can play, 
and in the last instance are only tests that have ourselves for witness 
and no other judge. For example: Not to hang on a person, even one 
most loved — every person is a prison, also a corner. Not to hang on a 
fatherland, even if it be one most suffering and necessitous — it is already 
less difficult to loosen one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to 
hang on a compassion, even if it be one for higher men into whose extraor- 
dinary suffering and helplessness chance has allowed us to glance. Not to 
hang on a science, even if it entices us with most precious discoveries 
apparently reserved for just us. Not to hang on one's own emancipation, 
on that blissful sense of the far and unfamiliar which the bird has that 
flies ever higher, in order to see ever more beneath it — the danger of one 
with wings. Not to hang on our own virtues and become as a whole 
a sacrifice to some part of us, e.g., to ' our hospitality ' — the danger of 
dangers for high-natured and opulent souls, who are prodigal with them- 
selves almost to the point of unconcern and carry the virtue of liberality 
so far that it becomes a vice. We must know how to preserve ourselves: 
strongest test of independence." Cf. as to the preliminary self-training 
of the ruler, Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 484, §§23-4, 27-8. 

eWill to Power, §713. It is curious to find a counterpart of this 
conception in the older, shall I say? profounder, theological view of the 
world as a scene of trial, in which, while many are called, few are 
chosen. The " chosen," however, as viewed by Christianity, are perfect 
members of the flock, supreme exemplars of the social virtues, while 
Nietzsche's " chosen " are those who stand more or less aloof from the 
flock, acting according to their own, not social law, as autonomous as 
God, indeed the human counterpart of God. 

h Beyond Good and Evil, §287. Cf. Will to Power, §940: "Higher 
than 'thou oughtst ' stands 'I will' (heroes); higher than 'I will' 
stands 'I am' (the Greek Gods)." Also Human, etc., §210: "Born 
aristocrats of the mind are not too eager; their creations appear and fall 
from the tree on a quiet autumn night without being hastily craved, 
pushed, or crowded by new growths. The unceasing wish to create is 
common and shows jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something, one 
really needs to produce nothing — and all the same does very much. 
Beyond the ' productive ' man there is a still higher species." Nietzsche 
cites the remark of Plutarch that no noble-born youth, in seeing the 
Zeus in Pisa, would wish to become even a Phidias, or, if he saw the 
Hera in Argos, would wish to become even a Polyclet; and that quite as 
little would he desire to be Anacreon, Philetas, or Archilochus, whatever 
delight he took in their poems (Werke, IX, 150). Great men protect 
artists, poets, and those who are masters in any direction, but do not 
confuse themselves with them ( Will to Power, § 943 ) . Perhaps it is in 
this exaltation of being above action that the secret (or a part of it) 
lies of Nietzsche's relatively low estimate of Carlyle and his hero- 
worship. On the other hand, Emerson (Essay on "Character") uses a 
legend which perfectly illustrates Nietzsche's thought : " Iole ! how did 
you know that Hercules was a god?" "Because," answered Iole, "I 
was content the moment my eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, I 



NOTES 521 

desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses 
in the chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for a contest; he con- 
quered whether he stood or walked or sat, or whatever he did." 

i Beyond Good and Evil, § 258. Cf. Will to Power, § 898, where after 
speaking of the equalizing process (Ausgleichung) going on in modern 
democratic society, he says, " This equalized species needs, as soon as it 
is attained, a justification: it is for the service of a higher sovereign 
type which stands upon it and only so can lift itself to its own task. 
Not merely a master-race whose function is exhausted in ruling; but 
a race with its own sphere of life, with a surplus of energy enabling it 
to carry beauty, bravery, culture, manners into their most spiritual ex- 
pressions; an affirmative race which can allow itself every great luxury — 
strong enough not to need a tyrannical imperative to virtue, rich enough 
not to need petty economy and pedantry, beyond good and evil; a hot- 
house for strange and choice plants." In ibid., 937, he quotes a French 
emigre, M. de Montlosier, who in his Be la monarchie francaise had ex- 
pressed the ancient sentiment of his class in an astonishingly frank 
manner : " Race d'affranchis, race d'esclaves arraches de nos mains, peuple 
tributaire, peuple nouveau, license vous fut octroyee d'etre libres, et non 
pas a nous d'etre nobles; pour nous tout est de droit, pour vous tout est 
de grace, nous ne somme point de votre communaute; nous sommes un 
tout par nous-memes." Nietzsche remarks that Augustin Thierry read 
this in 1814, and with a cry of anger proceeded to write his own book 
on the Revolution. 

J He said in one of his earliest essays ( " On the Use and Harm of 
History for Life," sect. 9 ) : " The masses appear to me to deserve a 
glance only in three ways: first, as fading copies of great men, made on 
bad paper and with wornout plates, then as a force of opposition to the 
great, and finally as instruments for the great; aside from this, the devil 
and statistics take them " ! This is disparagement, but not altogether so. 

k Henri Lichtenberger, in one of the most illuminating expositions of 
Nietzsche's social conceptions yet made, remarks that this is a part of 
his ethics which Nietzsche has left in the shade (" L'Individualisme de 
Nietzsche," Entre Camerades, Paris, 1901, pp. 341-57). See also his La 
Philosophie de Nietzsche, p. 151. 

1 All this is left out of account by writers, like a critic in the London 
Academy (June 28, 1913), who speaks of the "overman" as crushing out 
the weaker masses, and even by Brandes in his first article on Nietzsche 
(Deutsche Rundschau, April, 1890), who represents him as having only 
hatred and contempt for the undermost strata of the social pyramid. 

m This is a subtlety that appears to escape the subtle Mr. Balfour 
himself and all who argue for the necessity of an other than naturalistic 
ethics, if the weak are to be respected; it was perhaps first strikingly 
set forth by C. C. Everett, in an article, " The New Ethics," Unitarian 
Review, Vol. X, p. 408 ff. (reprinted in Poetry, Comedy, and Duty, see 
pp. 287-8). 

"Meyer (op. cit., p. 310) thinks that Nietzsche started with the ordi- 
nary economic or political meaning of " slave," and then generalized, 
beginning to do so in Human, All-too-Human. 

o When we in America speak of slavery, we are apt to think of what 
existed in our country, before the Civil War, when a black man had " no 
rights which a white man was bound to respect " — but this laisser faire or 
anarchy is not a necessary accompaniment of slavery. 

PCf. Richter (op. cit., pp. 244-5), "Why recommend measures to the 
weak, by which they preserve themselves? Should not all the weak 
disappear? This Nietzsche believes that he must positively deny. The 
mass . . . will always be necessary in the interest of the strong; . . . 
only those who are altogether sickly and crippled in mind and body, 



522 NOTES 

who corrupt and disintegrate the species and consequently do not facili- 
tate, but rather render more difficult the producing of the superman, 
should pass away — for them there is only one virtue: to disappear." 

Q Cf. William James's references to the world of concrete personal 
experience as " tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed," to the " vast 
driftings of the cosmic weather" (Pragmatism, pp. 21, 105) — apparently 
James could only find relief in experiences of a more or less mystical 
character {ibid., p. 109, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 380, 388, 
422, but see p. 425 ) . 

rCf. Richter's statement of the "moral task" of the weaker; "dis- 
regarding their own development (Ausbildung) , to make possible the 
production, preservation, furtherance of strong personalities" {op. cit., 
p. 245). 

9 That business men, when they go out of business, are often at a 
loss how to occupy themselves and are most unhappy, is well known. 

t A consideration of this sort may explain the extremely contrasted 
points of view of Genealogy etc., II, § 17, and Werke, XIII, 195, § 430, in 
commenting on the origin of the state (in the one case force, in the 
other, reverence being emphasized ) . 

uThe passage which Hoffding (op. cit., p. 174) quotes as evidence 
that Nietzsche changed his mind — it is to the effect that the rulers are 
to win the deep unconditional confidence of the ruled (Werke, pocket ed., 
VII, 486, §36) — is not inconsistent with " Herrenmoral," and there are 
as many strong expressions of the latter doctrine in his later writings 
as earlier. 

v A " Kampf der Kasten," at least at the beginning and latent always, 
is not, as Hoffding thinks (op. cit., p. 175), inconsistent with a 
" gemeinschaftliches Ziel " — this has been explained in the text. The 
same may be said of the " hostility " to which Dorner refers. As for 
the " abyss " or " ditch," of which Faguet speaks, Nietzsche would have 
it, but at the same time "no antitheses" (see Will to Power, § 891). He 
expressly mentions as one of his problems, " How is the new nobility to 
organize itself as the power-possessing class? how is it to mark itself 
off from others without making them enemies and opponents"? (Werke, 
XII, 122, § 240— the italics here are mine). 

w Faguet regards what he conceives to be Nietzsche's idea, that the 
higher class has held the mass down by force, as historically false, urging 
that the mass have wished to be governed aristocratically, being essen- 
tially aristocratic in their sentiments and in a sense more aristocratic 
than the higher class itself — since among the latter self-interest may 
work, while among the mass the feeling is a passion against interest 
(op. cit., p. 344 f.). Faguet does not do justice to the complexities of 
Nietzsche's meaning, but he perhaps states an essential truth. 

xCf. the description of the highest man as determining the values 
and guiding the will of millenniums, rulers being his instruments (Will 
to Power, §§ 998-9) ; also the picture of the wise man, 

" Strange to the people and yet useful to the people," 
(Werke, pocket ed., VI, 52). 

y We have already found Nietzsche warning against confusing the 
higher egoism with impulses which, apparently egoistic, have really for 
their aim a social result (for example, the impulse for the accumulation 
of property, or the sexual impulse, or that of the conqueror or statesman — 
see Werke, XII, 117, §230). 

zlt must be admitted that there is still another difficulty, which 
is hinted at by Dolson, op. cit., p. 80. The higher individuals, loosed from 
social bands, may be hostile to one another (cf. Werke, XI, 240, § 198; 
XIV, 76-7 — the mutual hostilities of strong races, as described in Will to 
Power, § 864, are, I take it, another matter ) . For if it comes to physical 



NOTES 523 

conflicts, other parts of the society may take sides, and the life of the 
whole be endangered — one thinks of the Wars of the Roses, and of feuds 
such as have often existed between noble families. But though such 
possibilities cannot be denied, Nietzsche's ordinary thought of an aris- 
tocracy is of something cohering — indeed, something which makes a prin- 
ciple of coherence and organization for the society to which it belongs: 
the same men, who, in one aspect of their being, are individuals proper, 
are, in another, functionaries of (if only to the extent of giving legis- 
lative thought to) the society. If then they push their individualistic 
instincts so far, that they go to fighting one another and jeopardizing 
the life of the society, they must be restrained. As if envisaging a 
situation of this general character, Nietzsche once defined it as the 
problem of the legislator to join together forces out of order, so that 
they shall not destroy themselves in conflict with one another, and so 
secure a real increase of force (I follow here Halevy's Vie, p. 341, not 
being able to locate the passage he cites). He calls it the task of culture 
to take into service all that is fearful, singly, experimentally, step by 
step, adding, however, that till it is strong enough to do this, it must 
fight, moderate, or even curse what is fearful (Will to Power, § 1025; 
cf. Werke, XII, 92, §182). For, as already explained, temporary hos- 
tility to great men may be justified on grounds of economy — they may 
use up force too quickly, which, if stored, would grow to greater (Will 
to Power, § 896). 

aa In one passage (Werke, XII, 119, §233) Nietzsche even questions 
whether the ends of the individual are necessarily those of the species, 
but here I think he means of a given species. The variant individual 
may be the principle of the possibility of a higher species, or he may be 
a species (so to speak) all by himself: humanity may present a suc- 
cession of species, one rising above another. 

bb Morality (in the usual sense) regards man as function purely, i.e., 
so far degrades him — this being said, of course, only from the highest 
point of view. Cf. Joyful Science, § 116. 

ccThe question is sometimes raised (e.g., by Hoffding, op. cit., pp. 
68-9) whether Nietzsche was an Utilitarian. It is a question which has, 
to one who has felt the new issues which Nietzsche raises, a somewhat 
antiquated air; all the same we may say that if Utilitarianism is the 
doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number (or of all — each 
counting for one and no more than one) as the standard, Nietzsche was- 
not an Utilitarian, since he held that there may be individuals who are 
more important than ^ others, even than all the rest combined. Quite 
as little was he an Utilitarian so far as this is an eudaemonistic doctrine,, 
for questions of pleasure and pain (no matter how universalistically 
conceived) have a secondary place with him. But so far as Utilitarianism 
means that actions are good and bad not in themselves, but with reference 
to ends beyond them, the highest end being the highest possible develop- 
ment of humanity, Nietzsche was an Utilitarian, for he broke entirely 
with Intuitionalism (which is little more than uncritical common sense 
turned into a formal doctrine) : nothing to him is good or bad, right or 
wrong, of itself, or as a divine command, or as an unanalyzable dictate 
of conscience. At the same time the highest development of humanity is 
not conceived in social but rather in personal terms — hence the happy 
characterization of his doctrine by Simmel as Efiisjajialism. The actions 
of the mass, indeed, the mass themselves and all who sfbp short of being 
persons, are viewed in an utilitarian light — he speaks of himself in this 
way ("fearful," yet "beneficent," Ecce Homo, IV, §2); but the supreme 
individuals are not utilities, being rather the standard by which utility 
in all else is measured. 

d d Nietzsche's view that the flock -feeling (social sentiment) should 



524 NOTES 

rule in the flock (society), needs to be emphasized, in view of the common 
misapprehension of his meaning. I have already noted his strong state- 
ment that flock-morality is to be held " unconditionally sacred " [in the 
flock], Will to Power, § 132. He protests that higher natures are not to 
treat their valuations as universally valid (Joyful Science, §3). The 
question may, of course, be raised whether contrasted valuations are con- 
sistent with a common goal, and we may say in reply, (1) that it is not 
impossible that different classes should move toward the same goal, even 
if they are not aware of doing so, and (2) that as matter of fact 
Nietzsche seems to conceive that the mass may have some idea of the 
final goal and willingly lend themselves to movement in that direction. 

ee See Will to Power, § 898, where it is accordingly said that the 
leveling is not to be hindered, but rather hastened. For a long time the 
mechanizing process must seem the only aim (Werke, 1st ed., XV, 415 — I 
cannot locate this passage in the 2d ed., from which I quote in general). 
This, I need not say, is very different from making the process a final 
aim, as Walter Rathenau seems to do (Zur Kritik der Zeit). There is 
another version of Nietzsche's general view in Will to Power, § 866, which 
may be summarized as follows: The outcome of modern tendencies will 
be a whole of enormous power, the single factors of which, however, 
represent minimum forces, minimum values; in opposition to this dwarf- 
ing and specializing of men, there is needed a reverse movement — a 
producing of a synthetic, justifying type of man, for whom the general 
mechanization is a condition of existence, as a sort of ground framework 
(Untergestell) on which he can devise a higher form of being for himself. 
He needs the antagonism of the mass, the feeling of distance from them — 
he stands on them, lives off them. Morally speaking, the mechanization 
represents a maximum of human exploitation; but it presupposes those 
on whose account the exploitation has meaning. Otherwise the mechaniza- 
tion would be actually a collective lowering of the human type — a retro- 
gressive phenomenon in grand style. All this in opposition to the 
economic optimism which would find the sacrifices of all compensated by 
the good (Nutzen) of all; instead, these sacrifices would add themselves 
up into a collective loss, and we could no longer see for what the immense 
process had served. Cf. Faguet's enlargement on the possibilities of 
the actual coming of a superior race (op. cit., p. 275). 

ffAn organic connection might even be said to exist between the 
higher and lower, considered as exceptions and the rule. " What I contend 
against: that an exceptional type should make war on the rule, instead 
of realizing that the continuance of the rule is the presupposition for 
the value of the exception " ( Will to Power, § 894 ) ; he gives as illustra- 
tion women with extraordinary desire for knowledge, who, instead of 
feeling the distinction that this brings, wish to change the position of 
women in general. 

CHAPTER XXX 

a Nietzsche is similarly classed with "anarchists, ego-worshipers, 
rebels to law and order" in the Quarterly Review (October, 1896, p. 318). 
Also Ludwig Stein speaks of his " anarchistic-aristocratic theory " 
(Friedrich Nietzsche's Weltschauung und ihre Gefahren, p. 167) — cf. Kurt 
Breysig's view, Jahrluch filr Gesetzgebung, XX (1896), pp. 4-14, but also 
the admissions on p. 16. 

b Griechische Kulturgeschichte, III, 378-9, " The decisive and notable 
thing in it [philosophy among the Greeks] is the rise of a class of free, 
independent men in the despotic polis. The philosophers do not become 
employees and officials of the polis; they willingly withdraw from it . . . 



NOTES 525 

and over against it and public business and talk, the free personality wins 
force and opportunity for contemplation." 

c Cf . Mazzini's description of Austria as " not a nation, but a system 
of government," and a casual remark of Nietzsche to his sister after 
hearing some patriotic songs, " Fatherland is to be sure something other 
than state" (Hamburgischer Correspondent, September 15, 1914, p. 2). 
Similarly R. M. Maclver speaks of the Roman Empire as "not a society, 
not a living thing, but an imposed system, an institution " ( International 
Journal of Ethics, January, 1913, p. 134). Meyer explains Nietzsche's 
antagonism to the state, to the extent it existed, as due partly to the 
circumstances and tendencies of the time, and maintains that he always 
thought of the organization of society as realizing itself through essen- 
tially political forms (op. cit., pp. 24-6, and 441). 

<J Only from a similar point of view, i.e., because he placed the Poles 
high in the scale of rank, can I account for the opinion once expressed 
that their political unruliness and weakness, even their extravagances, 
indicate their superiority rather than anything else (Werke, XII, 198, 
§421). 

e I may refer in this connection to my little book, Anarchy or Gov- 
eminent f An Inquiry in Fundamental Politics (1895). 

f As bearing on the future of marriage he proposes in one place 
heavier inheritance taxes, also a longer period of military duty, on 
bachelors; special privileges for fathers who bring a goodly number of 
boys into the world, in certain circumstances the right to cast several 
votes; a medical record to precede every marriage and be signed by the 
communal authorities (in which a variety of questions by the parties and 
the physicians are to be answered, "family history") ; as an antidote to- 
prostitution (or an ennobling transformation of it) the legalizing of 
marriages for given terms (a year, a month), with guarantees for the' 
children; every marriage answered for and recommended by a certain 
number of trustworthy men in the community, as a community affair 
(Will to Power, § 733). 

e Nietzsche found the literary class as well as the political parties 
and the socialists repulsive (Werke, XIV, 358, §223; cf. the reference to 
the literary class who "live" off their opinions, ibid., 357, §222; also 
Joyful Science, § 366 ) ; and Berthelot comments on his opposition to the 
conservatives and reactionaries who were only bent on retaining their 
material goods and maintaining Christian morality (Grande Eycyclo- 
pSdie, art. " Nietzsche " ) . Ironically enough, in Germany the literary 
class and artists seem to have been most affected by Nietzsche — probably 
through admiration for his qualities of style rather than from any con- 
siderable understanding of his thought. 

k It may be said, however, that a united Europe was once a possibility 
at the hands of another Frenchman, earlier than Napoleon — Henry IV, 
who had an end put to his career by the dagger of Ravaillac. 



INDEX 



Abelard, 230. 

Adams, Charles Francis, 491. 

Addams, Jane, 20. 

Aerial Navigation, 146, 473. 

^schylus, 82, 292, 398, 480, 481. 

Alcibiades, 400. 

Alcohol, 7, 109, 149, 376, 423, 464, 
491. 

Alcuin, 372. 

Alexander, 369, 518. 

Allen, Grant, 355. 

America (or Americans), 2, 131, 
369, 463. 

Amor fatiy 17, 161, 170, 437, 446. 

Anacreon, 520. 

Anarchy (or anarchists), 76, 138, 
349, 379, 383, 410, 417, 421, 423, 
424, 433, 457-9, 523. 

Anaxagoras, 481. 

Angelo, Michael, 105, 481, 487, 517. 

Anti-Semitism, 85-6, 467, 471. 

Antitheses, absolute, questioned, 
242-3; particularly moral ones, 
243-5. 

Antony, Marc, 517. 

Apocalypse, the, 236, 506. 

Apollinic and Dionysiac forms of 
art, 40-44, 82. 

"Aristocratic radicalism," 32, 402. 

Aristotle, 14, 22, 104, 292, 305, 393, 
486, 602. 

Arnold, Matthew, 203, 285, 355, 
361, 504, 507. 

Art, fundamental nature and use of, 
39; two forms of Greek art, 40- 
2; the tragic drama as a fusion 
of the two, 43-4; the World- Will 
as artist, 47-8, 482; modern mis- 
conception and misuse of art, 75, 
480; possibility of a new art of 



the Dionysiac type, 78 ff. ; Wag- 
ner as the ideal artist, 81 ; later 
questionings about Wagner's art, 
87-91; art under a shadow in sec- 
ond period, 101, 129-130; criticism 
of poetry and music, 102; fresh 
appreciation of poetry in conclud- 
ing period, 155; connection of 
morality with, 339; an element of 
danger in (for the thinker), 487. 

Artisten-Metaphysik, 47, 49, 194. 

Asceticism, 8, 37, 282, 317, 375, 413, 
432, 500. 

Atheism, 20, 37, 61, 88, 105, 146, 
157-8, 160, 171, 203, 331, 340, 445, 
492, 507; a permissible sense of 
"God," 172. 

Atkinson, Mabel, 504. 

Aurelius, Marcus, 173. 

Austria-Hungary, 459. 

Avenarius, 496. 

Awxentkff, N., 249, 354, 504. 

Bab, Julius, 475. 

Bach, 485. 

Backward races, utilization of, 146, 
471. 

Bacon, 492. 

Bad conscience, 116, 120, 225, 274- 
282, 507. 

Bahnsen, Julius, 178, 498. 

Balfour, A. J., 309, 521. 

Balzac, 400. 

Bancroft, George, 466. 

Barbarism (or barbarians), hate 
for, 104; dams against, 137; war 
a return to, 142; price for ceasing 
to be, 144; barbarians "from 
above," 413, 462. 

Bauer, Henry, 479. 



527 



028 



INDEX 



Payne, Peter, 505. 

Beethoven, 83, 370, 411 (457), 491, 

508, 516, 517. 
B£lart, Hans, 509. 
Benn, A. W., 304, 494, 501, 

511. 
Bentham, 348, 490. 
Bergaigne, Abel, 255. 
Bergson, 499. 
Berkeley, 483. 
Bernoulli, C. A., 487. 
Berthelot, Rene, 13, 368, 477, 496, 

502, 515, 517, 525. 
Beyer, Richard, 14, 476, 508. 
Bismarck, 88, 314, 357, 398, 400, 

464, 465, 466, 471, 475, 518. 
Blake, William, 503. 
Blanqui, 178. 
"Blond beast," 3, 280, 281, 367-8, 

405, 466, 515. 
Bohler, 114. 
Bohme, Jacob, 503. 
Borgia, Caesar, 400. 
Bosanquet, Bernard, 519. 
Bose, meaning of, 226-8, 516. 
Boscovitch, 183. 
Bradley, F. H., 483, 517. 
Brahmanism (or Brahmans), 215, 

240, 375, 392, 519. 
Brahms, 86. 

Branch, Anna Hempstead, 244. 
Brandes, Georg, 32, 245, 254, 264, 

402, 478, 521. 
Breysig, Kurt, 327, 477, 524. 
Browning, Robert, 389, 516. 
Brutus, 33, 393. 
Buckle, 450. 
Buddhism (or Buddhists), 89, 90, 

108, 206, 279, 338, 361. 
Burbank, Luther, 495. 
Burckhardt, Jacob, 11, 26, 34, 40, 

99, 406, 457, 477, 480. 
Burgess, John W., 466. 
Burke, Edmund, 312. 
Butler, Bishop, 176. 
Byron, 386. 



Cabot, J. E., 484. 

Csesar, Julius, 369, 371, 372, 387, 
393, 400, 517, 518. 

"Callicles" (in Plato's "Gorgias"), 
125, 505, 514. 

Cantor, 494. 

Caracalla, 377. 

Carlyle, 6, 39, 235, 288, 347, 399, 
520. 

Carlyle, Mrs., 453. 

Carnot, 491. 

Carolsfeld, Schnorr von, 519. 

Carr, H. Wildon, 494. 

Carus, Paul, vi, 12, 351, 374, 510. 

Caspari, O., 177. 

Castromediano, Sigismondo, 517. 

Catholic Church, restraining influ- 
ence of on greed before the 
Reformation, 74 ; suggestiveness 
of as a super-national power, 145;' 
intolerance of helped to make the 
European mind fine and supple, 
230; its way of bettering Ger- 
man nobles in the Middle Ages, 
280; Vornehmheit of the higher 
clergy, 372; the church in one 
way a higher order of institu- 
tion than the state, 372, 414 (cf. 
429). 

Causality, 57, 110, 188, 197, 262, 
483, 488, 494. 

Cervantes, 10. 

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 471, 
475. 

Chamfort, 98, 490, 491. 

Chance (or accident) opposed to 
design, not to causation, 106, 159, 
166-7, 500; Nietzsche's practical 
attitude to, 161-2, 404, 408, 488. 

Chaotic side of the world, 106, 153, 
159, 160, 446. 

Chatterton-Hill, Georges, vi, 12, 303, 
377, 453, 494. 

Christian Morality, questioned, 2; 
its seductive influence on thinkers, 
23, 207; does not include hon- 



INDEX 



529 



esty with oneself, 330; is social 
morality par excellence, 325; an 
assertion of the interests of the 
mass against superior classes, 
344; here the secret of Nietzsche's 
antagonism to, 344, 509. 

Christianity, how it became " an 
historical power," 60; now pass- 
ing into a gentle moralism, 105; 
like socialism in ignoring indi- 
vidual differences, 139; necessary 
to most in Europe now, 186; hose 
to the old world, 227 ; its attitude 
to pain, 236; spiritualizing of 
cruelty, 239; supplanting of the 
old master-morality by a slave- 
morality, 258-260, 436; sense in 
which it is a redemptive religion, 
284; what its spiritual men have 
done for Europe, 304; its use of 
the idea of selection, 307; makes 
it impossible to sacrifice men, 
309; a typical way of thinking 
for a suffering species of men, 
348; its God a very wise being 
excogitated without moral preju- 
dice, 504; Nietzsche has had noth- 
ing unpleasant from, 484; wishes 
to give it a bad conscience so far 
as it teaches anti-natural ideas, 
275, 282; his object not to an- 
nihilate the Christan ideal, but to 
put an end to its tyranny, 453; 
valuable to the flock, but harmful 
to higher men, 453; how Conte 
has outchristianed it, 508. 

Cicero, 387. 

Commercialism, 2, 74-5, 132, 465. 

Common, Thomas, vi, 18, 28, 171, 
415, 510. 

Comte, 195, 340, 431, 508. 

Consciousness, not the core of our 
being, 108, 196, 200, 345, 352, 
488, 498. 

Conservatism, Nietzsche's essential, 
32, 118, 402-3. 



Copernicus, 183. 

Courtney, W. L., 480. 

Crauford, Oswald, 514. 

Creative power, man's, 129-130, 153, 

218, 336, 341, 371-2. 
Crime, 117-8, 245, 376, 393, 439, 

516. 
Crispi, 468. 
Cruelty, psychology of, 238-240; 

legitimacy of on occasion, 240-1; 

cruelty in conscience, 240, 277-8; 

"cruelty of nature," 356 (437). 
Culture (in the general sense), 32, 

65, 72, 388, 468; a new, 30, 58, 

83, 88, 125, 292, 397. 
Curtius, 256. 

Dante, 105, 173, 237. 

Darwinism, mixed attitude to, 2, 
310, 401-2, 510; the struggle for 
existence, 37, 479; progress in the 
past through greater advantages 
accruing to variations, 64; no 
progress but by variation and 
selection, but we must do the 
selecting, 389; Darwinian over- 
valuation of outer conditions, 198, 
355, and neglect of the fact that 
the weak may by combination be- 
come masters of the strong, 437 
(cf. 514) ; a testing of Darwin's 
ideas by experiments extending 
over centuries, 404; the utility of 
an organ does not explain its 
rise, 499; early suggestion of the 
possibility of an ethics on Dar- 
winian lines, 513. 

Death, free, 118, 301, 312, 429. 

Decadence (or degeneration), 16, 
198, 308-9, 374, 377, 390, 408, 417, 
423, 433, 444, 508, 521. 

Democracy, 64, 135-8, 369, 417-8, 
434, 441, 472, 507, 518, 521. 

Democritus, 481. 

Demosthenes, 60. 

Demuth, P. M., 477. 



530 



INDEX 



Descartes, 230, 475. 
Determinism, 115, 175-6. 
Deussen, Paul, 7, 476. 
Dewey, John, 225, 375, 507. 
Dewey and Tufts, 214, 218, 223, 

255, 256, 269, 271, 502, 505, 509. 
Dickinson, G. Lowes, 515. 
Diogenes Laertius, 5. 
Disraeli, 475. 
Dolson, Grace N., vi, 163, 205, 347, 

364, 445, 447, 448, 463, 510, 511, 

512, 522. 
Dorner, August, 373, 408, 438, 444, 

445, 475, 479, 494, 497, 499, 512, 

522. 
Dostoiewsky, 516. 
Dreams as interpretation of bodily 

states, 488. 
Drews, Arthur, 85, 86, 88, 90, 101, 

169, 178, 350, 485, 487, 494. 
Diihring, Eugen, 271. 
Duty and duties, 66, 265-9, 436, 506, 

516. 

Eckhard, Meister, 238. 

Education, 74, 97, 120, 404, 442, 483, 
485, 487, 489, 512. 

Eggenschwyler, W., 496. 

Egoism, ordinary, 67, 293, 388, 519; 
implied by altruism, 293, 309; 
the higher, 126, 294, 430, 508, 
522; the principle for judging, 
347; misleading as a term for 
Nietzsche's doctrine, 378. 

Eisler, Rudolph, 477, 498. 

Eliot, George, 19, 155, 385. 

Ellis, Havelock, 65, 475, 476. 

Emerson, 20, 72, 202, 228, 275, 310, 
357, 366, 368, 392, 395, 402, 427, 
472, 477, 489, 501, 513, 517, 520. 

Empedocles, 33. 

Encyclopedia Britannica (9th ed.), 
art. " Wagner," 87, art. " Diony- 
sus," 480; (10th ed.), art. " Nietz- 
sche," 302, 457, 475, 515; art. 
" Ethics " 510, 515. 



English, the, appreciation of in sec- 
ond period, 98, 467; English 
psychologists honored, 239 ; " mod- 
ern " ideas of English origin, 419, 
462; British Empire, 459; in gen- 
eral, 467-8. 

Epicurus, 33, 112. 

Equality, 288-291, 390, 425. 

Eternal recurrence, current belittle- 
ment of the idea, 163; theoretic 
basis of, 164-9; depressing effect 
of on Nietzsche, 169; how this 
was counteracted, 170; ethical 
problem ensuing, 171; a kind of 
theodicy, 172-3; fortifying effect 
of the doctrine, 174; reconcilia- 
tion with freedom, 175; a prob- 
ablity simply, 176; was Nietzsche 
the first to teach it?, 177-9; its 
probable reception, 179; a quasi- 
religion to Nietzsche, 180. 

Eucken, Rudolph, 34. 

Euripides, 58, 481. 

Europe, a united, v, 32, 143-5, 465, 
470, 525. 

Everett, C. C, 515, 521. 

Every man, value of, 65, 117, 126, 
381, 439, 446. 

Ewald, O., 494, 510. 

Explanation, contrasted with de- 
scription, 110, 184, 188, 488. 

Ezekiel, 284. 

Faguet, Emile, 370, 445, 453, 456, 

504, 522, 524. 
Fichte, 47, 465, 516. 
Finite, the world, 160-1, 164 ff., 514. 
Fiske, John, 40, 355. 
Flaubert, 19, 355, 499. 
Flemming Siegbert, 477. 
Fontenelle, 98, 490. 
Force, 183, 190, 196. 
Forgetfulness, role of in morality, 

123, 490. 
Forster-Nietzsche, Frau Elisabeth, 

5, 7, 20, 28, 67, 83, 84, 88, 149, 



INDEX 



531 



160, 176, 303, 404, 476, 491, 501, 
513. 

Fouillee, A., 177, 178, 491, 494, 499, 
500, 514. 

Fowler, W. Wade, 383. 

Franco-Prussian War, Nietzsche's 
part in, 5, 6, 76; after-effects of 
in Germany, 35, 74; proved noth- 
ing in favor of German culture, 
468. 

Fredrick II (Hohenstaufen), 400. 

Freedom, a privilege and obligation, 
66, 387; "modern" ideas of, 418- 
9, 422. 

Free-thinking, advantage in, 146, 
332; distinguished from "free- 
thought," 146; "free-thinkers" 
levellers, 460. 

Free-will, illusory, 55, 113, 115, 319; 
causality and, 175, 494; a per- 
missible sense of, 374. 

French, the, appreciation of in sec- 
ond period, 98 ; their " old varied 
moralistic culture," 211; Mon- 
taigne et al. compared with Ger- 
man philosophers, 490; the best 
soldiers and first victims of 
"modern" ideas, 419 (468); in 
general, 468. 

French Revolution, the 18th century 
Aufklarung took a violent turn 
with, 135, 141, 402; the noblest 
spirits (except Goethe) led astray 
by, 288; un-German, superficial 
philosophy of, 491; made Napo- 
leon and Beethoven possible, 410, 
457; mistaken conduct of aristoc- 
racy at outbreak of, 433 ; the last 
great " slave-insurrection," 442 ; 
would not have had the same 
seduction, but for Chamfort, 491. 

Galiani, Abbe, 230, 392. 
Galsworthy, John, 305. 
Gambetta, 475. 
Gardiner, A. G., 478. 



Garibaldi, 475. 

Gast, Peter, 24. 

Gentleman, the, 395-6, 517. 

Germany (or the Germans), criti- 
cism of, 2, 3, 22, 24, 35, 74, 154, 
357, 370, 376, 395, 475; no German 
culture proper, 63, 464; " to be a 
good German is to un-Germanize 
oneself," 144; the specious culture 
represented by Strauss, 67 ; Nietz- 
sche loyal to his fatherland, 76, 
458, 525; Germans lacking politi- 
cal instincts, 141 (cf. 468); how 
they had to be trained to moral- 
ity, 263; pessimism among them, 
302; have reached a high-water 
mark of the historical sense, 464; 
German philology and the German 
military system ahead of any- 
thing in Europe, 466; their 
" Bedientenseele," 464, 471; lack 
psychological fineness, 464, 475; 
naturally serious, 466; defeated 
possibility of a united Europe 
under Napoleon, 465; " Deutsch- 
land, Deutschland uber Alles," 
465, 466;. nationalism and racial 
self -admiration, 471; possibility 
of leading Europe at time of 
Franco-Prussian War, 465; Ger- 
man music reflecting the demo- 
cratic spirit, 491; in general, 
463-7. 

Gersdorff, von, 83. 

Giovanitti, Arthur, 507. 

Gistrow, 491. 

Goebel, H. and E. Antrim, 511. 

Goethe, 7, 22> 32, 33, 39, 59, 68, 69, 
74, 82, 104, 202, 231, 288, 339, 
340, 370, 394, 398, 400, 415, 450, 
452, 463, 464, 486, 491, 508, 512. 

Gogol, 386. 

" Golden Rule," the, 298. 

Good, evil passing into, 119, 229- 
234, 244; good and evil impulses 
not different in kind, 118; par- 



532 



INDEX 



ticular senses of " good " and 
"evil," 124, 247-257; "beyond 
good and evil," 1, 3, 260. 

Gorky, Maxim, 517. 

Graham, Stephen, 475. 

Grande Encyclopedic, art. " Nietz- 
sche," 508, 515, 525. 

Granger, Frank, 517. 

Great men, fearful side of, 234-6, 
393, 523. 

Greece (or the Greeks), judgment 
on old age, 32; somber undertone 
of, 40, 101; how saved from pes- 
simism, 39-44; view of pity, 305; 
origin of current impression of 
" Greek cheerfulness," 480 ; inter- 
esting because having so many 
great individuals, 65, 409, 431; 
shameless readiness of nobles to 
break their word, 329; aristocra- 
cies "lived better" than we, 406; 
tendencies to a " slave-morality," 
505-6; state not a regulator of 
culture, but a muscular helper or 
escort, 77; great epoch from 
Hesiod to iEschylus, 480 (cf. 383, 
387, 390) ; emulative spirit, 247 
(432); a synthesis of Oriental 
elements and beginning of the 
European soul, 460. 

Green, Thomas Hill, 384. 

Grote, George, 505. 

Grutzmacher, It. H., 445, 475, 476, 
512. 

Guyau, 178, 198, 500. 

Haldane, R. B., 466. 
Hal6vy, D., 26, 296, 453, 477, 523. 
Hamblen, Emily S., vi, 478, 513. 
Hardness, 16, 71, 73, 153, 310, 413, 

490. 
Hardy, Thomas, 131. 
Harvard Graduates' Magazine, vi. 
Hegel, 51, 59, 157, 205, 223, 372, 

391, 464, 483, 492, 497. 
Heine, 178, 400. 



Helmholtz, 176, 483. 

Helvetius, 348, 369, 490. 

Henry IV (of France), 525. 

Heraclitus, 33, 47-8, 177, 365, 379, 
383, 415, 479, 493, 514. 

Herder, 51, 398. 

Hesiod, 480. 

Hibben, J. G., 302, 358. 

Higher individuals, the raison 
d'etre of society, 63-6, 128, 307, 
359, 388, 390, 430, 431-3, 438, 443, 
445, 452; how society tends to 
train them, 221-3, 384. 

Hobbes, 492. 

Hobhouse, L. T., 492. 

Hoffding, Harald, 13, 32, 305, 445, 
475, 505, 522, 523. 

Holderlin, 178. 

Hollitscher, J. J., 364. 

Homberger, 398. 

Homer, 34, 102, 349, 481, 502. 

Hope, Nietzsche's mood of, 32, 416. 

Horneffer, August, 486, 501. 

Horneffer, Ernst, 475, 501, 512. 

Humboldt, von, W., 157. 

Hume, Bennett, 514. 

Hume, David, 492, 495. 

Huxley, 98, 131. 

Identity, 117, 167, 186,495. 
Illusionism, 50, 110-1, 182-5; will to 

illusion deeper than that to truth, 

482. 
" Immoralist," 210-3, 416. 
Individualism, 351-2, 378-9, 420, 

512. 
Industry, great men of, 134, 491; 

the present industrial culture the 

lowest form of existence that hag 

ever been, 491. 
Innocent III, 276. 
"Instinct, everything good is" (noi 

"every instinct is good"), 353 
Intellect, the, original practical pur 

pose of, 52; theoretic use of, 55 

Chap. XV passim. 



INDEX 



533 



" Intuition," 316. 

Isaiah, 28, 258, 311. 

Israel, ancient, rise of " slave-moral- 
ity" in, 257-260; religious ideal- 
ism of, 488. 

Italy, 468-9. 

James, the elder Henry, 449. 

James, William, 55, 240, 355, 482, 
483, 496, 501, 503, 513, 521. 

Jerusalem, W., 496. 

Jesuitism (or Jesuits), 33, 519. 

Jesus, 33, 117, 118, 195, 227, 342, 
395, 508, 511. 

Jews, the, 471, 507. 

Joel, Karl, 227, 475, 477, 478, 480, 
503. 

Jowett, B., 505. 

Justice, 66, 269-271, 329, 511; con- 
trasted with revenge, 271-3; self- 
transcendence of in grace, 273. 

Kaftan, Julius, 475. 

Kant, 4, 14, 24, 33, 37, 45, 58, 71, 78, 
111, 115, 123, 129, 154, 157, 189, 
190, 205, 207, 287, 314, 323, 383, 
447, 464, 488, 490, 492, 495, 497, 
500, 501, 504, 506, 508. 

Kerler, Dietrich H., 489. 

Keyser, C. J., 482. 

Kleist, Heinrich von, 46, 386. 

Kiilpe, O., 350, 477, 494, 498. 

La Bruyere, 98, 490. 
Lachmann, Benedict, 512. 
Laisser-faire, 32, 74, 334, 374, 418, 

420, 440, 459, 521. 
Lalande, A., 499. 
Landor, W. S., 477. 
Lange, F. A., 33, 49, 483, 497. 
Language, an international, 145, 

473. 
Lanzky, Paul, 477. 
La Rochefoucauld, 98, 119, 490. 
Lassalle, 475. 
Lasserre, 195. 



Laughter, 11, 394-5, 480, 493. 

Lazarus, 214. 

LeBon, Gustav, 178. 

Lee, Vernon, 510. 

Leibnitz, 230, 464. 

Leopardi, 68, 386, 477. 

Levy, A., 512. 

Levy, Oscar, vii. 

Libertinism, 374, 423; of the intel- 
lect, 16, 320, 374, 376. 

Lichtenberger, Henri, vi, 150, 475, 
479, 486, 521. 

Liebmann, O., 501. 

Life, the immoral foundations of, 
37-8, 48, 157, 198, 292, 434. 

Literary class, the German, repul- 
sive to Nietzsche, 525. 

Lob, Walther, 493. 

Lobeck, C. A., 477. 

Locke, 492. 

Lory, Carl, 492, 509, 512. 

Lotze, 501. 

Love, 68, 126, 153, 296-8, 329, 348, 
407. 

Lowell, James Russell, 420. 

Loyalty, 94, 329. 

Lucretius, 40. 

Ludovici, A. M., vi. 

Luther, 157, 463, 518. 

Mach, E., 496. 

Machiavellism, 456. 

Machinery, 133, 440, 484. 

Maclver, R. M., 525. 

MacVeagh, Wayne, 518. 

Manu, Laws of, 286, 427, 519. 

Marriage, 7, 244, 269, 311, 407, 422- 
3, 459, 518, 525. 

Martin, Mrs. John, 309. 

Mason, D. G., 516. 

" Master-morality " and " slave- 
morality," 124, 248-260, 362-3, 
390-1, 461, 504, 505, 522. 

Materialism, rejected by Nietzsche, 
45, 110. 

Mazzini, 235, 475, 525. 



534 



INDEX 



Mechanical view, the, 159, 183-4, 
196, 499. 

Medici, Lorenzo de\ 370. 

Mencken, Henry L., 170, 351, 476. 

Merimge, Prosper, 100, 477. 

Meyer, R. M., 11, 30, 51, 67, 150, 
178, 254, 340, 350, 398, 475, 476, 
477, 479, 481, 488, 490, 492, 494, 
497, 509, 512, 515, 518, 520, 521, 
525. 

Meysenbug, Malwida von, 7, 83, 480. 

Mexico, 567. 

Middle Ages — alcoholic poisoning of 
Europe, 109. 

Mill, John Stuart, 271, 440. 

Mirabeau, 33, 252. 

Mobius, P. J., 20, 37, 163, 476, 477. 

Modernity, 59, 204, 422. 

Mohammed, 33, 154, 288, 409. 

Mommsen, 398. 

Montaigne, 33, 98, 230, 405, 490, 
504. 

Montgomery, Edmund, 488, 511. 

Montlosier, de, 521. 

Moore, A. W., 496. 

Moore, G. E., 467. 

" Moralin," 325. 

Moral order, idea of a, 283-6, 507. 

Morality, idealistic meaning of, 59, 
206, 355, 378; freedom vital to, 
70; shaping influence of physio- 
logical conditions upon, 109; 
critically considered, 115-124 (in 
detail, Chaps. XVII-XXIII, net 
results of the criticism, 322-331) 
social utility the basis of, 121-3 
constant elements in, 121, 217 
law of social groups, 213-7, 380-1 
necessity and gravity of, 217-8 
confined to social groups, 219-221 
455-6; the present chaos in, 203 
4; how a problem, 208, though 
one for few, 208-9; varying types 
of — of peoples, 247, the priestly 
class, 248, the master and slave 
classes, 249-254; philological con- 



firmation of the view of a master- 
morality, 254-6; development of 
a slave-morality in ancient Israel 
and under Christianity, 257-260; 
type of morality proposed by 
Nietzsche, Chaps. XXIV, XXV. 

More, Paul Elmer, vi, 203, 485, 508. 

Morison, J. Cotter, 489. 

Moses, 33. 

Motley, J. L., 466. 

Mozart, 93. 

Miigge, M. A., 195, 479, 492. 

Muller, P. E., 505. 

Muller-Frienfels, Richard, 496. 

Music, peculiar nature of, 78-9, 87; 
romantic music turned from in 
second period, 102, 487; value of 
music independent of our enjoy- 
ment of it, 352 (cf. 450) ; influ- 
ence of democracy on, 491. 

Musset, Alfred de, 386. 

Nageli, von, 178. 

Napoleon, 234, 245, 275, 369, 377, 

400, 409, 410, 448, 463. 
Nation, The (New York), 305, 374. 
Nationalism modern, vi, 1, 32, 74, 

85, 143-5, 405, 465, 518. 
"Natural laws," 56, 106, 159, 184. 
Nature, no ideal, 355; not a return, 

but a " coming up " to, 463 ( cf . 

515). 
Neighbors, love of, 300. 
Nero, 377. 
Newman, John Henry, 16, 31, 323, 

477, 482, 504. 
Niebuhr, 77, 518. 
Nordau, Max, 5. 
" Nothing is true, everything is 

permitted/' 19., 320, 336, 374. 

Oehler, Richard, 512. 
Opera, Nietzsche's detestation of or- 
dinary, 80, 87. 
Orage, A. R., 322. 
Orestano, Fr., 456. 



INDEX 



535 



Organ, 198. 

" Organic," meaning of, 451. 

Ostwald, W., 516. 

Ought, 116, 286-8, 345, 507. 

Overbeck, Franz, 11. 

Palestrina, 105. 

Paneth, 492. 

Pascal, 33, 36, 100, 230, 281, 319. 

Panpsychism, an early species of, 57. 

Pater, Walter, 480. 

Paul, Jean, 398. 

Pearson, Karl, 379. 

Peasants, 436, 518; peasant blood 
the best in Germany, 405, 434 
(467, 518). 

Peck, H. T., 514. 

Pericles, 518. 

Perry, Ralph Barton, 376, 495. 

Personalism, as a title for Nietz- 
sche's ethical doctrine, 378-9, 523. 

"Persons" (sovereign, self-legislat- 
ing individuals), 222-3, 265, 379, 
Chap. XXVI, 411, 430, 512, 520. 

Pessimism (and optimism), 31, 40, 
103, 108, 156-9, 492-3. 

Phenomenalism, 50, 111. 

Phidias, 292, 520. 

Philetas, 520. 

Philosophy, meaning of, 36, 479 ; in- 
fluence of physiological states 
upon, 109; more than science and 
criticism, 151-3; a sublimated 
form of will to power, 195, 201, 
371 (cf. 394), 522; every great 
philosophy a sort of involuntary 
memoires, 336. 

Physiological view of man, 108, 345. 

Pindar, 40, 82. 

Pity, 301-313, 424, 508. 

Plato, 33, 77, 104, 118, 154, 202, 
212, 271, 314, 329, 341, 365, 383, 
387, 425, 429, 481, 482, 489, 505, 
514. 

Pleasure and pain, 158, 201, 347-8, 
499-500, 511. 



Plutarch, 211, 520. 

Poe, 386. 

Poles, the, 24, 525. 

Polyclet, 520. 

Polytheism, moral significance of, 

396-7. 
Positivism, 98, 151-2. 
Practical need determining beliefs, 

52-5, 113-4, 185-7, 190. 
Pragmatism, 267, 496. 
Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 24, 163, 353, 

354, 515. 
Progress, 417, 460. 
Protestantism, the most impure 

type of Christianity that exists, 

464. 
Punishment, 117-8, 267, 299, 424, 

489, 515. 
Pythagoreanism, 40, 163, 178, 487. 

Rangordnung, idea of a, 200, 287, 

338, 366, 379, 410, 425, 459, 519. 
Raphael, 59, 80, 105, 487. 
Rathenau, Walter, 524. 
Realism, Nietzsche's fundamental, 

57, 111-2, 189, 191-3. 
R6e, Paul, 100, 216, 324, 476, 486, 

505. 
Reformation, the German, 74 r 

419. 
Religion, 105, 147, "429, 453, 488; 

Nietzsche's essential religiousness, 

12, 331, 340-2; eternal recurrence 

as a, 174, 180. 
Renaissance, the, 435, 464, 488. 
Renouvier, 501. 
Responsibility, in one sense, denied, 

116, 261; in another affirmed, 

261-5. 
Richter, Raoul, vi, 9, 14, 81, 85, 148, 

176, 195, 354, 366, 402, 461, 475, 

478, 483, 485, 486, 487, 489, 494, 

497, 498, 504, 510, 512, 513, 514, 

521, 522. 
Riehl, Alois, 8, 18, 99, 102, 104, 112, 

129, 151, 163, 170, 226, 232, 236, 



536 



INDEX 



339, 368, 476, 487, 489, 492, 495, 

498, 501, 504, 505, 512, 513, 515. 
Riemann, 176. 
Rights, 62, 219, 265,-9, 391, 408, 

506. 
Ritschl, F. W., 4. 
Rittelmeyer, Friedrich, 25, 176, 404, 

477, 483, 494, 508. 
Rogers, A. K., 477. 
Rohde, Erwin, 27, 43, 478, 480, 485, 

487. 
Romans, the, 146, 215, 216, 255, 258, 

266, 383, 387, 409, 422, 425, 465. 
Romanticism (or romanticists), 92, 

99, 150, 152, 161, 210, 492, 504. 
Rousseau, 33, 69, 205, 447, 463, 490, 

508. 
Russia, varying views about, 469- 

470. 

Sacrifice, 20, 119, 122, 127, 200, 216, 
282, 291, 299, 300-1, 309-10, 347, 
349, 391, 401, 434. 

Saint, the, 62, 69, 195, 201, 393, 
500. 

Saintsbury, George, 15, 178, 475, 
477. 

Salome, Lou Andreas-, 91, 156, 169, 
194, 341, 476, 478, 479, 486, 494, 
503, 504, 505, 512. 

Salter, W. M., vi, 55, 479, 481, 525, 

Samuel, First Book of, 506. 

Scharren, Heinrich, 512. 

Scheffauer, H., 508. 

Schelling, 157. 

Schellwien, Robert, 512. 

Schiller, 80, 157, 483. 

Schiller, F. C. S., 513, 514. 

Schleiermacher, 23, 157, 508. 

Schmidt, Leopold, 255, 505. 

Schmitz-Dumont, 177. 

Schopenhauer, 3, 5, 8, 12, 14, 25, 31, 
33, 37, 38, 39, 45, 46, 48, 49, 58, 
64, 67, 69, 71, 78, 81, 82, 88, 100, 
110, 115, 119, 129, 130, 153, 154, 
157, 173, 189, 190, 195, 196, 205, 



207, 208, 236, 275, 276, 279, 284, 
288, 292, 302, 303, 315, 323, 324, 
346, 353, 355, 361, 381, 400, 434, 
464, 471, 475, 482, 483, 488, 490, 
498, 499, 501, 503, 504, 508. 

Schumann, 485. 

Schure, Edouard, 476, 486. 

Science, wisdom instead of the goal 
in first period, 58; high place 
given to in second period, 98, 100, 
101, 104, 316, 489; science and 
the ideal the note of the third 
period, 155; praise for strictness 
and severity of, 96, 316; a human- 
izing of things, 110; came into 
the world like a smuggler, 120, 
486; day of to come, 146; cannot 
be independent of philosophy, 
151; preliminary work for a sci- 
ence of ethics, 246; possibility of 
a properly scientific ethics, 361-2, 
402; cannot answer the problem 
of its own value, 318; no pre- 
suppositionless science, 318; does 
not fix the ethical ideal, 335; 
every one should master at least 
one science to know what scien- 
tific method means, 486 ; Nietzsche 
never a master in any science 
himself, 98, 176-7, 486; attitude 
to scientific specialism, 2, 36, 65, 
152, 195, 428. 

Scott, Walter, 465. 

Secretan, Charles, 501. 

Seeley, J. R., 449, 516. 

Self-control, 125, 373-4, 387, 394, 
432. 

Self-training of higher men, the, 
412-3. 

Selfishness, 70-1, 295-6, 351, 372, 
390, 484. 

Seydlitz, von, 25, 476, 478. 

Shaw, Bernard, 3, 68, 70, 398, 405. 

Shelley, 19. 

Sickness and suffering, utility of, 
237-8. 



INDEX 



537 



Simmel, Georg, 205, 259, 303, 351, 
353, 359, 365, 378, 379, 400, 430, 
452, 490, 494, 496, 501, 510, 511, 
512, 523. 

Simonides, 40. 

Slavery, a basis of culture, 32, 38, 
72-3, "130, 292, 480; broad use of 
term "slave," 72, 127, 249-250, 
442-3, 451, 521; how emancipa- 
tion might be got, 135, 441. 

" Slave-insurrection in morality," 
257-260, 419, 442. 

Smith, Norman Kemp, 495. 

Smith, William Benjamin, 493. 

" Social dualism," the charge of, 444, 
454. 

Social Museum of Harvard Uni- 
versity, 457. 

Social revolution, a coming, 134, 
410, 421, 441, 461. 

Socialism (or Socialists), 2, 77, 
134-5r 138-141, 420, 461-3, 490, 
491, 507, 508, 519. 

Socrates, 58, 104, 118, 130, 207, 215, 
227, 243, 257, 329, 390, 431, 479, 
517. 

Solipsism, 57, 191. 

Sophists, the Greek, 350, 353, 512. 

Sophocles, 40, 79, 92, 284, 292, 502. 

Soul, the, 107, 174, 488, 495, 497. 

Space and time, early view of as 
subjective, 46, 56; tiiae later held 
to be objective, 129, 164, 490. 

Spencer, Herbert, 158, 198, 230, 233, 
335, 355, 441, 459, 491, 508. 

Spinoza, 33, 205, 236, 489. 

Springfield Republican, the, 73. 

Stael, Madame de, 492. 
| State, the, origin of in force, 76, 
242, 279, 455, 506, 522; justifica- 
tion of, 76; possible disappear- 
ance of, 141 ; enforces justice, set- 
ting limits to revenge, 272-3; con- 
ceivably so strong that it might 
let wrong-doers go, 273; so far as 
it represents an independent so- 



cial group, super-moral, and 
politics Machiavellian, 455-6; "as 
little state as possible," 459. 

Stein, Ludwig, 479, 524. 

Stendhal, 275, 400, 409. 

Stewart, Herbert Leslie, vi, 501, 
502. 

St. Francis of Assisi, 259. 

Stirner, Max, 351, 353, 459, 
512. 

St. James, Epistle of, 284, 504. 

Stoics, the, 177, 355, 494. 

St. Paul, 227, 258, 284, 488, 508. 

St. Peter, 227. 

Strauss, D. F., 35, 45, 53, 67, 484, 
485. 

Substance, 185. 

Sumner, W. G., 131, 133, 214, 224. 

Super, C. W., 480. 

Superman, the, history of the term, 
398; Nietzsche's essential mean- 
ing, 400; relation of the concept 
to Darwinism, 401 ; how to be got, 
402; slowness of real social 
change, 402; worth of turning 
thought and aspiration that way, 
403; place of Zuchtung, 404; how 
related to wealth, 405; signifi- 
cance of marriage, 407; educated 
by opposition, danger, war, 409; 
self-training, 412; Nietzsche's 
challenge to scholars, 415; mood 
of hope, 416. 

Symonds, J. A., 480, 481. 

Sympathy, 67, 126, 217, 302, 508, 
510. 

Taine, H. A., 21, 26, 152, 499. 
Talmud, the, 516. 
Tennyson, 99. 
Tertullian, 259. 

"Theodicy," a Greek, 41; views of 
Nietzsche almost a, 172-3, 233-4. 
Theognis, 5, 255, 518. 
Thierry, Augustin, 521. 
Thilly, Frank, 351, 368, 510, 515. 



538 



INDEX 



1 Things-in-themselves," current mis- 
use of, 190. 

Thomson, J. A., 408. 

Thomson, Sir William, 165. 

Thucydides, 289. 

Tienes, G. A., 430, 512. 

Tintoretto, 481. 

Tolstoy, 75. 

Tonnies, Ferdinand, 498. 

Toy, C. H., 506. 

" Transvaluation of values," 3, 260. 

Treitschke, von, 465, 475. 

Trendelenberg, 479. 

Trevelyan, G. M., 517. 

Truth, proposal to change the 
meaning of, 188, 320; truth and 
utility distinguished, 52-5, 113-4, 
188; is there an unconditional 
obligation to speak the truth?, 
314, or to know it, 315-322. 

Tyndall, 98. 

Tyrrell, Father, 323, 502. 

Uhegoistic actions, illusion in the 

idea of, 119; differing senses of 

" unegoistic," 282, 489. 
Universal suffrage, 425, 442. 
Urban, Wilbur M., 518. 
Utilitarianism (or Utilitarians), 

121-3, 205, 237, 253-4, 327, 346, 

348, 378, 467, 511, 523. 

Vaihinger, Hans, 14, 303, 475, 494, 
496, 497. 

Values, created by the mind, 153, 
186, 218, 316, 321, 335, 510, 512. 

Vanity, 29, 124, 369, 490. 

Vauvenargues, 98, 490. 

Venice, 383, 392. 

Vice, 376, 423. 

Vinci, Leonardo da, 400. 

Virtues, Nietzsche's four, 329; vir- 
tue as strength, 375. 

Volkelt, J., 276. 

Voltaire, 23, 99, 100, 158. 

Voluntarism, pluralistic, 194, 498. 



Wagner, Cosima, 7, 81, 89. 

Wagner, Richard, 3, 5, 15, 25, 31, 34, 
35, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 78-91, 102, 
291, 314, 315, 319, 399, 400, 465, 
466, 475, 480, 485, 486, 487, 513. 

Wallace, William, 302, 305, 475. 

War, 2, 75, 142-3, 410-1, 414, 510; 
the Franco-Prussian (see under 
ibid.) ; the present European 
war, v, 3, 414, 459, 478; war be- 
tween ideas, 411, 461; rules of 
Nietzsche's "war-practice," 483-4; 
the great war to come, 2, 414, 
473. 

Warbeke, J. M., 508, 514. 

Wealth, 131-2, 137, 388, 405-7, 418-9, 
455. 

Weber, Ernst, 485. 

Weigand, W., 322, 506. 

Weinel, Heinrich, 474, 477, 495, 506, 
507, 509, 515. 

Welcker, 67, 505. 

Westermarck, 505. 

Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, von, 178, 
485. 

Will to believe, 95, 316. 

Will to power, the bottom thing in 
man and the world, 192-201; 
more than an impulse for self- 
preservation, 197, 350; primarily 
a psychological and cosmological 
(not ethical) doctrine, 194, 354; 
details of the view, 196-201; re- 
lation of to the moral aim pro- 
posed by Nietzsche, 354-378; how 
morality comes to be contrasted 
with, 363-4. 

William II ( Hohenzollern ) , 467. 

Wilson, Woodrow, 349. 

Winckelmann, 39. 

Windrath, E., 479. 

Wolf, A., vi, 476. 

Wolf, Friedrich August, 479. 

Woman, 7, 24, 407, 408, 416, 468, 
486, 524. 

Wordsworth, 120, 287. 



INDEX 539 

Working-class, the, 308, 418, 428, Zarathustra, 33, 324. 

439-444. Ziegler, Theobald, 20, 86, 99, 148, 
World-organization and economy, a, 163, 434, 475, 477, 485, 487, 489, 

145-6, 404-5, 414, 470-3. 494, 501, 505, 512, 518. 

Wright, Willard Huntington, 501. Zoccoli, 195. 

Wundt, W., 176, 214, 251, 255, 256, Ziichtung, 66, 179, 261, 375, 404, 

498, 501, 502, 505. 434. 



